Tweet Marker is going really well. It’s growing fast, users love it, and it has wide support in all of my favorite Twitter apps.
Today I’m announcing the next step for the service: Tweet Marker Plus. This is a paid subscription with additional features, such as a brand new search and a web-based timeline that syncs with Tweet Marker. Along with Plus, I’m rolling out version 2 of the API.
We’ve learned a lot over the last few months. Here are some of the things that I wanted to improve for the next version of Tweet Marker, both for the API and the business.
- Consistent behavior across clients. It was fine at first for everyone to experiment with their own way to use the API, but now it's time to come up with some best practices to guide developers.
More frequent sync. Mac and iPad clients in particular — where the app may stay in the front for some time — need to be hitting the server at regular intervals to catch changes from other devices. I believe this is the most common source of problems.
JSON-based API. The "v2" API should use JSON and carry more metadata, such as timestamps for the tweets and when it synced.
Profitable hosting. Although I've accepted donations since nearly the beginning, hosting costs are way up. I didn't originally intend to turn this into its own business, but that is the clear way forward. It needs to bring in consistent revenue to cover hosting now and into the future.
With paid subscriptions, I can tackle the above bullets and also add more features. The first new feature to launch as part of Plus is a new search. Tweet Marker Plus indexes tweets from your friends so that you can find tweets later. It's the solution to use when you don't want to search all of Twitter, but you also want a large collection of tweets, not just the most recent ones that many clients store and filter.
Tweet Marker Plus is $2/month. You can sign up today at “tweetmarker.net/plus”:tweetmarker.net/plus. Also check out “the screencast”:www.riverfold.com/software/…
The API documentation has moved to Github and is “also available now”:github.com/manton/tw…
