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Just a quick blogpost to let you all know we are now recognized by Twitter as an official client!
I guess the Tweet below says it all 
We think this is really cool. Another good reason to keep Twumult updates going. Expect some at the beginning of next week!
Got requests? Let us know!
So just a quick word on the updates for Twumult we are about to put online. Today we have some very important interface updates together with some new features. We believe the most important part about Twumult is the interface. So let’s start with that.
Within the interface we slightly changed the color arrangement. We removed the colors from the headers of the boxes. The colors are now applied to the tabs. Also we’ve added avatars, so you can recognize your favorite followers by their face, just like you do on Twitter.
The new features we implemented are viewing replies, DM’s and to get an overview of the people you follow. Previously you only were able to send replies, now you are also able to post updates directly. You find it in the top left corner of the application.
To conclude, we made some changes to adding boxes to a tab. Previously we allowed you to add a person by just typing their Twitter username and add them. Now we fetch your following list and you can choose from that. So for now you can only choose the people you already follow.
We are really excited about the new interface. We hope you are too. We love to hear from you. Get in touch with us via a comment, Twitter or Getsatisfaction.
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 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.
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!
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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!
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!
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.
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.
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