Webstrong Ltd

Just a week after our initial launch we’re releasing a major update for Twission. We’ve gotten some great feedback over the past week. So a big thank you to everyone who gave their opinion and got in touch.

New features included in the update are:

• Highlighting new tweets as they arrive into the browser;
• Friend of a friend filter has finally been enabled;
• The number of friends you have in common with the people in the results are now shown alongside each tweet.

We’ve also been working on increasing performance and have made two major changes that will make service a lot more efficient and reliable.

• An enhanced queuing system has been introduced. Tweets will no longer arrive out of order and no more then one request will be made to the server from the browser at any one time.
• Social graph caching has been put in place to reduce the number of calls required to the Twitter API.

Usage by Numbers

So far the system has seen some spikes in its usage. For instance, the day after we launched, Dragon’s Den was broadcasted in Ireland on RTE and we saw a surge in traffic to Twission.

Here’s a brief summary of the volumes seen over the previous week:

• 497 keyword searches
• 99 distinct users
• 535 cached social graphs (in the last 24 hours)
• 8,844 search requests
• 19,299 delivered tweets

I also noticed Twission got some recent coverage at the Bizcamp event in Limerick. It’d be great to hear back from anyone who was there (unfortunately I missed it) and let me know what they thought of it and if there was anyway it might be improved.

Continued Updates

I hope these updates help make the service more fun and useful but also more reliable too. As always, feedback is our friend. So if you have any comments to make mail us now at webstrong dot ie or get me on Twitter @iarfhlaith.

UPDATE – Soon after publishing this post we noticed a small bug in how we load a users social graph. This should be fixed now. We’ve also made the users name a link back to their Twitter profile.