TweetPivot now includes @Mentions

We're very pleased to announce that we have now added @mentions to our TweetPivot Twitter Client. This was the most requested feature from our users who submitted to our recent survey.

What this means for you, the user, is that you'll now be notified if you're mentioned by another twitter user - whether you follow them or not.

We think that mentions are important and should stand out from the normal 'background noise' of twitter. So we decided to differentiate these tweets by using a new colour scheme. That way they are immediately noticeable; even in a collection of 100s or even 1000s.

We hope you like it.

Survey Results

We've been asking our beta testers if they could spare a few minutes to fill out a short survey for us. We'd hoped it would help us identify the types of users that were interested in signing up for a beta (some might even say alpha!) version of our software. We have to say that the results have been fantastic. Not only do we have a good idea of the types of 'Twittergraphic' our future users might fall into but we've also identified which features you guys feel are, currently, most important to you. Everything you mentioned is on our todo list - but now we can prioritise the ones that will have the biggest benefit.

We are still trying to contact everyone who completed the survey to offer our personal thanks. Some of you even went further than the structure of our survey and suggested new ideas that we hadn't even considered! This gets us excited. Users that suggest new concepts we hadn't thought of are priceless and we'd love to talk with you further.

We'll try to get at least one new version out by the end of this year. As some of you may have read in my latest personal blog post, Time to Move On, we are now going to start pushing development on apace.

So, again, huge thanks to everyone who's helped us get the ball rolling in 2010. In 2011 we're going to repay you all by building something stunning!

Silverlight, PivotViewer and TweetPivot. Where now?

Unless you've been living under a virtual rock for the past few months you couldn't have escaped the gossip surrounding Silverlight's future. At its heart is the suggestion that Microsoft may be ditching it in favour of the new HTML5 standard. At this year's PDC Bob Muglia made a slight gaff during interview that further flamed the dissent on this technology. He has since written a blog post clarifying his position.

So, let me clarify our position at TweetPivot.

Yes, we are a Microsoft-centric company. We are proud members of the BizSpark program and use Microsoft development environments, tools and frameworks to deliver our solutions. And that's the key - they're just tools. The PivotViewer control is a fantastic piece of work originally created by the Live Labs team. It does quite a few things that we don't utilise and it doesn't do a whole host of things we'd like it to; but it's a starting point.

PivotViewer and, indeed, Silverlight have enabled us to get going with our ideas about how people should be interacting with social media. What is core to what we do are our ideas, not the technology we use to implement them.

We have a very strong internal product road-map that will enable us to deliver our ideas to all devices and form-factors. Technologies will come and go, but our ideas are independent of these changes and remain of great value to our users.

BizSpark Summit 2010

On 23rd September TweetPivot attended the BizSpark Summit at Microsoft's offices in London. We had an exhilarating couple of days meeting the great people that work on this team and other startups that are part of the program. Huge thanks to Bindi Karia, Cliff Reeves and Belinda for all the help and coaching they freely offered.

The highlight, of our day at least, was the opportunity to pitch what we do as part of the Pitch Session. The judges presented a rather daunting facade through which to penetrate:

• Per Roman, Partner, GP Bullhound
• Julie Meyer, CEO and Founder, Ariadne Capital
• Sean Seton-Rogers, General Partner, PROfounders Capital
• Lars Lindstedt, Software Economist, Microsoft

Although we did not win we were delighted with the response and reactions from everyone there. You can watch our pitch and get a sneak preview of our new twitter client here. In the media player click 'More' and then select the 'BizSpark Summit Pitch Session'. Our pitch starts at 1 hour 3 minutes.

Why is our Beta Trial Delayed?

As many of you know, we were expected to start rolling out our new twitter client to some beta-triallers a couple of days ago. So, what's the delay?

1. Infrastructure Issues

Our server-side architecture had to change significantly to enable the uber-cool functionality that our twitter client relies on. As is always the case with software development, this threw up some unexpected difficulties. We simply hadn't envisaged the complexity required to adjust to, and fix, these.

2. SSL Certificate

We've been trying to order an SSL certificate from 123-Reg. Their level of service has been very poor with no communication when problems occurs. They have until lunchtime to deliver otherwise we're off to Go Daddy.

3. Breaking changes to Twitter API

Within the past few days Twitter made some changes to their API that has broken the 3rd-party library we're using. The fault developed because a, previously assumed, numeric field in their response now sometimes has the value "100+". This causes exceptions when you expect it to actually be a number! We know the library authors are working hard to fix this but we just have to wait for them.

So, where are we?

Issue 1 has been fixed, but issues 2 and 3 are still outstanding. As soon as they're resolved, we're ready to roll.

Apologies to everyone that's waiting for this trial. We really appreciate your patience and we'll let you know the instant it becomes available.

Twitter & TweetPivot announce 2 new Twitter Clients

Last night we announced our new Twitter Client. Little did we know that only a few short hours later Twitter were going to announce theirs. If you study the 'numbers' very carefully it does look as though @ev and @biz got slightly more press coverage than us, but we're trying to catch them up!

Twitter has done what it should have done a long time ago - revamp its website. After all, 78% of Twitter users still use it so it was well overdue some TLC. This move certainly reduces the differentiator that the leading 3rd-party Twitter clients have enjoyed. The website may now be "just good enough" to suppress power users' temptations to look for a fuller client.

However, we believe that the TweetPivot Twitter Client still stands apart from the crowd. We have made a departure from the usual fixed-column approach and developed a client whose core area is dynamic.

So, if you're looking for something different, something remarkable and you'd like to have a say in how it's developed why not sign up for the beta trial?

Helping Non-Profit Organisations find Volunteers with @TweetPivot

I have been on the look out for ways that TweetPivot could develop its social mission.

Recently @NetSquared tweeted:

How are you recruiting volunteers online? Share your expertise for this month's #Net2ThinkTank! (@ reply us or see: http://bit.ly/9iN6cI )

This got me thinking about how visualising Twitter followers using TweetPivot could be used to identify potential new volunteers for non-profit organisations.

It seems reasonable to me that a good place for an organisation to start looking for volunteers would be amongst its Twitter followers. Tweeps that follow a non-profit organisation on Twitter are likely to have an interest in its cause, indeed some may already be active volunteers. Others may be more passive supporters who could be 'converted' to volunteers, given the right circumstances and approach. For example, the non-profit organisation could use direct messages (DMs) to engage targeted followers individually on Twitter with a personalised approach tailored to their interests. Such approaches take time and care to do well, therefore careful selection of who to target is important to efficiently attract more volunteers. This is where TweetPivot can help.

By using appropriate filters in TweetPivot a non-profit organisation can reduce a follower list to a smaller number of people to target. For example, if you are looking for volunteers for an event in a particular location, then a filter can be used to quickly identify followers in that area. You could then filter out the ones who are not very active on Twitter (e.g. with a small Follower Count) as they are unlikely to respond to your DMs. If you need to reduce the number of 'Tweep targets' further, then you could restrict your list to people with a reasonable Klout score (a measure of Twitter influence).

Once your subset of followers is identified, you can save them to a Twitter list. You can then monitor the tweets of this group and spot openings for a Twitter conversation.

As an example, in response to a tweet looking for volunteers for an event to be held in the UK, we looked at the 2500+ @crisiscamp followers: http://bit.ly/9jrxwI and used location filters to select just followers who are based in the London, then saved them to a Twitter list.

A video of this process can be seen at: http://bit.ly/9nh5P2

If you try this approach, then let us know if you find it useful as a way of finding new volunteers in the comments below or by replying to @tweetpivot.