With the launch of tweep tracker I wanted to give a few minutes to write a little about what we were hoping to accomplish with the app.
First the goals for the app. Being all avid users of Twitter we first greatly enjoyed the service, but found that there were plenty of shortfalls in the features surrounding twitter’s main functionality. While there was an app that gave you a popularity rank, and an app that tells you if Jim is following Sally, we saw a shortage of functional applications that really made Twitter easier to use and manage. Our biggest hassle personally had been managing our contacts, we simply had a few scripts personally we would regularly run to cleanup and manage our followers. Additionally, with the recent growth and popularity of twitter meant an onslaught of spammers, this made these scripts even more valuable, so we thought it would be a worthwhile exercise to launch this same type of service more publicly. Our goal is simple, make your twitter contacts manageable.
Secondly our personal goals for the app. As a small focused consulting group, we wanted to give a quick showcase as to what we’re capable of. We took this on as something we expected to personally find useful, but also get some ramp up for other projects in some of the frameworks and api’s we would be using in the future. As a result have a pretty cool contact management app that was developed in under 40 man hours from start to finish for our initial version, as well as some very pluggable code for twitter authentication that we’ve open sourced for others to use however they wish. This piece alone would reduce our effort in recreating tweeptracker to under 20 man hours from scratch if it were being recreated. Since then of course we’ve continued adding features and performance tuning to provide a better experience. We hope others may find this as useful as we would in any future twitter apps.