Shotbeak.com

A few months ago, I decided it is time to sell TwimeMachine. The code, 2 years old and ducktaped to hell, was breaking. Random errors kept slipping in. Instead of working to fix it, I rather wanted to just sell it and work on something new. Just as I started looking for buyers, the ad revenue and traffic shot up. I was rather busy and couldn’t fix it. Time went on and I had to relearn Django for test. Opting to kill two birds with one stone, I recoded TwimeMachine in Django.

As per usual, when I start a new app/web idea I try do it in a new language, with new architecture, whatever. Just something new I can learn. So, I opted to learn how Heroku works as well Amazon’s S3 for serving static files. It was quite a learning experience, learning how to set up virtual environments for Python and getting Heroku to work together.

So, what’s new? Feature-wise. Nothing new. But I have coded in such a way to easily add new features. I am probably going to add a once-off premium service in the feature that will enable users to download their tweets, read @mentions and read hashtags. When that will, I don’t know. Architecture-wise, it is running on Heroku and serving static files from S3. Will see how it pans out. I still have no clue how to determine when to scale to more dynos. Apparently one dyno can handle between 10-50 requests a second, which amount at 10 requests a second to about 864 000 requests a day. So far I’m well within that range.

Heroku offers 750 free hours, which if I am thinking about this correctly, amounts to 31 days of constant requests (at 1 request per second). That amounts to +- 2.6 million requests per month. My calculations might be wrong. If I am, please correct me. I’ve tried googling for these stats, but haven’t found any. As for S3, it should basically be free.

So currently, I’m running it all for free. Which is awesome! Lastly, I have set up opt-out following of @twimemachine. I get around 300-600 uniques a day. So hopefully I can build some traction from that into my Twitter account. Currently, nothing on TwimeMachine has any traction. There are no network effects or anything being stored (atm), so I’m relying on that to build up some value.

So, go to TwimeMachine and have fun reading your old tweets. And remember, it is not cool to live in your past.

If there are any errors, do let me know.

Cheers!

So. I decided to add permalinks to TwimeMachine along with the ability to view other people’s old tweets.

It stumbled upon some hiccups while developing it, most notably being errors with Twitter’s API and one specific account. It seems that sometimes Twitter says an account has more tweets than there actually are, but I only found it with one account, wikileaks. Now, I’ll be hasty before I jump to conclusions (OMG CONSPIRACY!), Twitter has had errors with tweet counts for quite a while. I tested several accounts (about 20) and only wikileaks seemed to have that error.

Most accounts thus will show the proper amount of old tweets.

So, here is an example of the permalinks:

To read Justin Bieber’s old tweets, simply go to http://www.twimemachine.com/user/justinbieber. To read Lady Gaga’s old tweets, simply go to http://www.twimemachine.com/user/ladygaga. To read it, you must sign up (rate limiting).

As with each new iteration of development, errors might occur and new bugs might pop up. Don’t hesitate to let me know!

Haven’t blogged in ages!

Just an update on various things.

Been heavily busy with my 3rd year. The second semester has been as expected packed academically, even more so than the 1st semester. It is more work, but this time I am more prepared. I am coping and loving most of the work. The marketing is especially quite challenging, but learning something new each day! That’s the way I like it. I can truly see how I am going to use my module on marketing research for plenty of things in my life.

I’ve also decided to continue studying next year. Going to do an honours in Socio-Informatics. Looking forward to it!

On to my projects:

Tweekly.fm

It’s going strong! It surpassed the 50 000 user mark earlier this month (and adding plenty of new users each month). It is incredible!

Twimemachine

Doing no marketing for it at all, yet it still gets picked up my social media ‘experts’, pumping the hits into the site. I’m actually looking to sell it. I have plenty of features I want to incorporate into it that I don’t have the time for. Let me know if you are interested.

Music

Been jamming it up, churning out tunes. My brother and I made an electro-house tune. Have a listen. It is called Dynasty. On the personal front, I’m coming closer to releasing an EP. There are 2 maybe 3 songs I feel is good enough to get some proper vocal treatment.

That’s it for now. Peace.

It’s been a while since I made proper blog post to update on my life and what’s going down.

Study Study

The topic says it all. I have one semester left, until I graduate (if all goes smoothly) with a degree in Socio-Informatics and Marketing. My plans are up in the air for next year. I’m kinda ‘over’ studying. If the honours program in Socio-Informatics turn out to be super interesting, it might become an option to continue with my studies at Stellenbosch. But the problem with Stellenbosch, is that the longer you stay here, the greater the comfort zone and bubble it becomes. Something might happen with Tweekly.fm that sees me jump full-time into that after I get my degree. So far my default option is going to be to head to Melbourne next year. I have temp visa, so why not take the option?

Tweekly.fm

It is growing. And growing well. We are pushing a lot of tweets a day (as much as the whole of Twitter did a day back in 2007). And by the nature of our service, it will keep growing. A new server that sits at last.fm (thanks guys!) is also doing wonders for both the respective API’s (last.fm and twitter), making it faster and better. A host of new features will be rolled out later this year, making discovering new music much easier. So in that regard, it is going good. Now we still need to figure out that business model…

TwimeMachine

My TwimeMachine is also doing really well. A new design was made by Misha Kvakin. It gets these random ‘spikes’ of traffic when some ‘social media expert’ tweets about it. Always great to see. It is also win to know that apparently it was mentioned at Mesh Conference in Toronto. I don’t know in what capacity, just that it was.

Music

I have a soundcloud profile now for my new moniker, Simon Segfault. I’ve been making some dubstep. So go have a listen. I’ve decided that the next album/music I release must be top-notch. In that past when I had 10 songs, I just said, ‘k lets release it’, but this time I’m taking a different approach. And damn me for my big musical influences. I just don’t know what it will end up like. Might be dubstep/drum and bass album, or it might be lyrically inspired, blues, guitar electronica. Just don’t know. Might also do something with my brother that could turn into a vocal chiptune album. Maybe I’ll just all the above genres? Drum-blues-and-chip-step rock?

So I have one semester left to figure what happens next year? The options are so varied… For now, I’m just going to enjoy my holiday.

So my oldtweets app has gotten feet of its own. Without any marketing, it’s been gaining traction thanks to tweets, blogs and google juice. I decided to get it onto its own domain and make a new interface.

So, I present Twimemachine.com. It’s old tweets, but kinda better. Think oldtweets 1.2.

So, if you want to browse your old tweets with a simple interface, go to twimemachine.com and browse away!

Yes, twitter still doesn’t allow third party developers to browse past 3200 tweets.

Got any question, just post here. I’m also hosting a competition. I want a nifty “novel app” frontpage design, so anyone who thinks they can design a neat frontpage, can have a link to their website on the frontpage.