Sneak preview on interface improvements

Today we updated the application with optional reply viewing in the interface. This required some changes to our technique, so it took some more time as expected.

We’ve been playing around with the new interface design already. Here is a sneak preview of it.

These are the biggest changes:

• We removed the pink headers of the boxes. We did this in advance of implementing the user avatars. Displaying all the avatars on bright pink didn’t sound like a good idea.
• Normal tabs now have the bright pink color. In the future you can choose to have tabs with #hashtag names. These will become bright yellow.
• We added three tabs to the interface called: ‘Your followers’, DMs and Replies. Your followers will show a list of your followers and allow you to add them to tabs directly. The other two tabs will show you your replies and DM’s from Twitter.
• Right below the tabs we now have placed some action items. On the right we see: ‘Post update’ and ‘Send DM’. They speak for themselves. On the left we have ‘Add People’, ‘Share dashboard’ and ‘Delete this Dashboard’. Add people will be a little menu that collapses and show a tiny menu to allow you to add a new box for a user or hashtag. ‘Share dashboard’ allows you to share a dashboard with the public, for example when you created one for your event. ‘Delete dashboard’ will delete the dashboard your viewing.

We aim to launch the new interface tomorrow, depending on what we will implement. Some research on the Twitter API showed that implementing replies and DM’s in a convenient way takes longer than a day. So first we will do the interface improvements like avatars, clickable names, etc.

We love to hear your feedback on these changes to the interface. Also we’ve uploaded a sketch of the ‘Your follower’ tab to our Flickr account page. If you have feedback, please let us know.

Choose whether to see replies in Twumult

One of the first big features that has been requested was to choose between viewing replies. If you pop into Twumult and you want to see somebody’s updates you probably don’t want to see their replies to other people on twitter. You probably missed the entire conversation and therefore those Tweets aren’t interesting.

Right now switching the reply view is an option within the settings tab. It’s actually the first option you will find there. In the future more settings will be added there.

For now we will focus on spicing up the interface with some gradients, avatars and stuff like that.

Please feel free to send us your feedback on Twumult!

Best practice for account settings

I have a question to ask you. There are a lot of ways to implement account settings. I’ll name three here. What’s your favorite option?

On User model

In this settings type, all the settings are made available on the User model of your web application. So, for example, each setting has it’s own column on the users table. The settings can be fetched by using User.setting directly from your MVC framework.

The advantage of this is that it is easy to set up. The disadvantage is that it is non-scalable as hell. You would be ending up with 20+ columns in a users table.

Key-value pairs

This method is used by - for example - WordPress. They have a separate wp_usermeta table with the following relevant columns: user_id, meta_key, meta_value. This way, each user can have more settings than the default user stuff like password and username.

Disadvantage is that it will take more work to nicely bind all the keys as attributes to the User model. Advantage is that it is scalable.

Hash on the Model

A third option implements both. You would put one column named “settings” on the User model and fill it with a serialized text-based hash (ie. YAML) and deserialize it every time you read or save settings. The Rails plugin acts_as_configurable does this.

What’s your take on this?

#Hastags now available in Twumult

We had planned doing updates for the coming two days, but Michiel already implemented #hashtags tonight.

Here is how it looks:

As a example I use #leweb. We know some people that went to Le Web this year so we added them to a #leweb tab. We did this by entering their Twitter username and the corresponding #hashtag we want to filter with. Now this tab shows their three latest tweets containing #leweb.

This could be really interesting when attending to a conference, you see what other people are saying. Which enables a better participation during the event. The other upside is that when you’re not at the conference, you can focus on the people that bring news from the conference.

More filtering options will be added later.

Twumult now able to post replies

I just wanted to pop in and update you on Twumult.

Michiel and I reserved the coming two days to improve Twumult. Today we got some great feedback on what is missing and what you want Twumult to be. We listened and in the coming days we will implement some of your feedback.

Expect stuff like posting to Twitter directly from Twumult. Some interface enhancements, like displaying avatars, clickable usernamers that point to their Twitter page. Besides that we are looking into bigger updates. Like choosing whether replies from the people you follow to others are displayed or not. Also we want to do more with hashtags to create a useful tool for conferences.

For now we have implemented the ability to send replies to your followers directly from Twumult.

If you have feedback or ideas, please feel free to let us know! You can do this by leaving a message at our Getsatisfaction page or comment on one of our blogposts.

Again, feel free, we love to hear from you! 

Twumult can now group the people you follow!

We just update Twumult to the ‘Dirty’ version. It includes a few fixes and small tweaks, but above all.. the grouping function!

From now on you can add new tabs to your Twumult account and add people to that tab. It looks like this:

By clicking ‘Add new’ on the row of tabs you will be taken to the ‘Create dashboard’ screen. Here you just simply fill in a name and description for your group. The name will be used as the tab label. The description will be displayed at the top of the screen when viewing a tab.

This version is a milestone. It shows the real purpose of Twumult. In the screenshot above you see the latest three tweets of some very good dutch internet startups. What you might notice is that they don’t update frequently, which is obvious. Normally it’s a co-incident when I see news of them in my timeline. I must be viewing it. By creating this group I can easily see their latest three tweets. They just won’t get lost into my timeline anymore.

Next up are some interface enhancements!

Twumult updates to the interface and back-end

We just made some updates to the Twumult interface and back end. Not quite the functional updates we have planned for today. We experienced some small difficulties in the back end that needed to be solved before we can continue developing new features. We are preparing the back end to allow you to create tabs where you can group your followers.

The interface is now prepared for creating tabs. As soon as we have the tabs functional we will activate them in the interface. A side effect of preparing the interface is losing the people you follow on your dashboard. You need to re-add them to  your dashboard. We’re sorry for that.

At the moment Twumult is still in the ‘Most dirty’ version. With the tab update the status will change to ‘dirty’ ;-). After integrating the tabs we will do some interface design. Expect stuff like avatars, maybe some gradients and solving some issues with outlining.

Please feel free to drop your feedback and ideas about the interface here.

Share your ideas about Twumult

Twumult is young and we’re still very busy laying the foundations to make it a reliable service. We have some ideas where we want to go with Twumult in the future, but think that the ideas of the community are more important.

We created a MindMeister MindMap. Using the public feature in MindMeister you are able to edit our map. We want to see if a functional collaboration on this MindMap can take place.

By clicking and holding your mouse button you can drag around the MindMap to see all ideas. Add every little idea or inspiration you have!

Click the MindMeister button in the bottom of the MindMap to pop-out the map and start editing.

And the winners are….

Last friday we started a competition where we challanged you to guess our new Twitter Mashup. We received a total of eight guesses.

It’s time to announce the winners of a still-to-be-designed startup tee. How we determined the winners? We looked at the relevance of their guess regarding to our original plans. Most of the guesses had something to do with the concept of Twumult in some way. These five where the closest.

• Maarten den Braber
• Abdul Rahman Advany
• Martijn Pannevis
• Steven Kruyswijk
• Gerard van Enk

We will design the t-shirt somewhere next week and post the design on our blog. After the holidays we will order them and send them to their new owners.

Oh and by the way, here is a sneak preview of the next update of Twumult

We will launch this update soon. Most of the time today is invested in laying the foundations for grouping followers.

Twumult is out in the ‘most dirty’ version

You are about to witness the first public appearance of Twumult. We’ve been laying the basis and have just finished the ‘most dirty’ version of the service.

Within this version you need to login with your Twitter credentials. After putting in these credentials you will be able to add other twitter users directly to your dashboard. At the moment it only supports one tab. In the future you will be able to create more tabs and create groups. After creating groups filtering with Twitter Search will be added.

Here are some examples you could build with this tabbed interface:

• All your favorite people on Twitter from Amsterdam, Rotterdam or The Hague
• Your co-workers on Twitter
• People attending to #leweb (add the people you know that attend and add the hashtag to see what others say)

So this is the ‘most dirty’ version of our Twumult which means your looking at a proof of concept. Features coming up are:

• Define groups of user per tab
• Use Twitter Search to follow hashtags as a addition to a group
• Ideas from you Drop them here. Or leave them as a comment.

For now have fun playing around. In the meanwhile we’ll play a song on Guitar Hero!