OK Here’s the latest version. No I haven’t been resting for the last few days, I’ve been working on two interesting bit of functionality.

The first one is mostly happens at our servers, but only effects you. For the last few months I’ve had a nifty little cron job (a program that runs ever so often with out me having to tell it to every time) pulling in tweets from the public time line and then adding the senders, and a stripped down profile to a database

It’s simply taken the users bio, their last tweet, removed common words (like “a” and “the”etc) as well as duplicated words and stored them.

It wasn’t until I started looking at the results (running queries over the profile information) I saw just how much SPAM there is on twitter.

If I’m going to use this information to build a list of who people should follow I need to take steps to clean that dataset up. They have

So I looked around and found chirpio, they have a lovely little API for getting the user generated grade of any twitter user. Which hopefully will reduce the amount of spamers that get posted on the newly (new with this incarnation) suggested followers part of TwitterBrite.

Yes that right you can now get a nice list of users who you can follow and who’s interests match yours. And whats more, I will shortly (after Version 1 of TwitterBrite is done) be publishing a set of API’s for you to search the database as well as to allow you to add yourself to it (and of course remove yourself from it should you wish to).

Which leaves me the final chunk of news. I’ve amended TwitterBrite so that when you click on one of the button that are linked to tweets in your time line, the pop-up retweet, reply, userprofile etc boxes do not appear in the main timeline window, but in their own window, it look a whole host better, and also makes sense.

TwitterBrite TR1 (well it’s really TR3 I guess) can be located here.

I’ve moved TwitterBrite one step closer today to being a fully finished product. This evening I fixed the DM and Reply screens so they now work. I’ve also added an auto refresh for the timeliness, Replies and DM’s this means that when you click on a different tab the old information is discarded (saving memory) and when you click back, a new set of data is re-loaded.

This allows you to update your timeliness etc. but it may not be the best as far as usability is concerned. let me know either in the comments or via the help-desk if you would find a button on each tab more useful or if this works fine for you.

Download TwitterBrite (TR1)

Well I had hoped to, by now, then end of Q1 2010, released the first version of TwitterBrite. But as you can see (or rather can’t see) you still can’t buy it yet :(

Why is this, mostly because I’m rubbish at judging how long it takes to write code, and with Twitterbrite, unlike my under-grad days, I can’t stay up for 48hrs in a go and finish it all off.

So what have I been doing?

Well it’s mostly done, I’ve still got some of the options (auto follow, auto un-follow and the suggest new people to follow to sort out, but as a twitter client it works, you can see your time line, the general public time line, direct messages and replies to you, you can re-tweet messages, post RSS feeds, follow and unfollow people directly from the time line.

So whats left to do?

Well as I said above some of the options I want are currently missing, also missing is any access to lists :( I had hoped to include them but as the scheduled has slipped so I decided to fix what didn’t work first before adding new stuff. As well as this some of the error messages when twitter returns problems, are not exactly descriptive but there are no show stopping bugs (at least I haven’t found any in testing it)

All of this is to say it still isn’t ready, however it’s ready enough for you to test it out if you feel brave enough, Twitterbrite TR1 (Temporary release 1) can be downloaded, free of charge here.

I warn you it isn’t production ready (not by a long way) but feel free to test it out and let us know via our helpdesk, what you think of it.

This blog and leaving us your e-mail address isn’t the only way to stay up to date on TwitterBrite’s development, there is, live from today, a new facebook fan page and of course twitter account (it would be a bit of an oversight not to set a twitter account up for a twitter client… )

This is just a quick note (for a more in depth post see my personal blog) but we are giving away for free TwitterBrite’s interface to the Bit.ly API.

This interface allows .net programs (like TwitterBrite will be) to use bit.ly’s API calls in a way that’s easier for desktop programmers to use.

any way you can grab it, and a hopefully helpful guide, here

It may not look it, but a lot’s been happening since September.

TwitterBrite is nearing completion and should be ready Q1 of 2010.  However we know you don’t want to check back every day just to see if we’ve shipped yet, so I’ve added a little, let us contact you box.

Don’t worry we’re not about to push teeth whitening or manhood increasing links on to you, all we use your e-mail for is to let you know when you can download TwitterBrite and take it for a spin.

In other news, to improve the security of TwitterBrite we’re toying with the idea of using OAuth, and not storing any passwords (even localy, on your machine) however OAuth doesn’t work wonderfully in the desktop world.

Basicly rather than TwitterBrite saving your password in a database (the way it’s designed currently) every time you want to use TwitterBrite you will get a small twitter login window appear, you will then login directly to twitter and you will receive a number which you will type into TwitterBrite to login…

Clearly not the best, but it does prevent any issues with database corruption or security breaches your end.

Please let me know your thoughts on this, it is after all you who will end up using this.

“So,” I hear you ask, “What is TwitterBrite?”. Well it’s a new twitter client for windows that allows you to automate a lot of the routine twitter tasks that you may need to do as the person responsible for running a company twitter account.

It allows you to post directly from your RSS feed to your twitter stream, and of course TwitterBrite shortens the URL using bit.ly and truncates the title so everything fits in the 140 character limit.

TwitterBrite will allow you to manage more than one twitter account at the same time, it gives you an up to the minute report of how close you are to twitter’s magic rate limiter, and also allows you to locate and follow people.

“ZZZZzzzzzzz….. That’s old hat, That’s what HootSuite or Twitteroo do… True they do do that, however TwitterBrite is different, for example TwitterBrite doesn’t just find you 100 people who will follow you back, it also find people who are tweet about the things you tweet about, so you may only end up following ten people and getting ten people follow you back, but throes ten will be interested in the things you are interested in and are much more likely to click on your link, then 100 random people.