The End of an Era
Posted by admin | Filed under Information, News
Just to let everyone know. Twe2 as it is now is no more.
We have sold the code and are effectively closing down. As part of the purchase, the userbase credentials have been completly deleted – there are no messages and no credentials are stored at all.
The sale originally was to include the continuation of the Twe2 service however, Wadja dropped our ability to send messages to 3 messages a day just after we asked if their understanding of the contracts was ok for migration of owners.
We intend to post a couple more blog posts with our story and issues we faced in the near future, so stay tuned. We will be discussing our Architecure and how we managed to scale the system and the problems faced interfacing with the SMS system.
Regardless of recent issues we would actually like to thank Wadja for being a part of the success of the service and coming with us up to this point. We wish them the best in the future.
We would like to thank everyone for their messages of support and the making this service popular, both myself (@PaulKinlan) and @Prawlings remember watching twitter as Twe2 took off and we couldn’t contain ourselves with how much it got retweeted once it hit the community in India.
If you are interested we have a number of other services that you can checkout, including:
- Twollo – Find and Follow Twitterer’s automatically
- Tweba - The Twitter Marketplace – The Free way to buy and sell your stuff on Twitter.
Tags: bucket kicked, chocked, croak, squarked, the end
Our API Access to Wadja has been dropped.
Posted by paulk | Filed under News
Our API access to Wadja has been dropped to 3 messages a day. We are trying to contact Wadja to confirm that this is accidental or if it a more serious issue – possibly a breach of contract. We are investigating. The timing is unfortunate since we asked a question regarding the Contract at 1:30pm Friday (Yesterday).
Daily Number of Messages
Posted by paulk | Filed under News
Wadja, have asked us to make everyone aware that they cap the number of messages you will receive per day. Currently we believe the number is set to 50 tweets, we attempt to deliver every tweet regardless of the 50 limit.
If you notice that your the total number of messages you receive is less than this before you stop receiving tweets, please let us know by leaving a comment here.
Replies and Mentions
Posted by admin | Filed under Information, News
When Twe2 first launched, we offered the ability for you to recieve direct replies as well as mentions of yourself in the middle of a tweet. Replies were handled by the Twitter API and mentions were handled through the Search API. Mentions were so popular with Twe2 users that it was causing problems with our access to the Search API because we were querying it 30 times a seconds; because we are respectful of the services Twitter offer we decided to stop offering the ability to do mentions directly through the user interface (you could however still set up a search term)
Twitter recently changed their “Replies” API to support mentions directly. So with no extra work on our part, you should now no longer need to search on your name to get any tweets where you are mentioned in them.
We have to say a big thanks to Twitter.
This was their announcement.
Devs,
Before today calls to statuses/replies [1] would return only tweets that were prefixed with a @username. As clients began to recognize the value in mentions of a @username anywhere in the tweet, they opted to perform a search for @username to get the superset.Twitter agrees [2] that the definition of a reply has changed, and as such, calls to statuses/replies contain any tweets that include a mention of the authenticating user.
If your client has been using the Search API to retrieve @replies, you should begin to migrate to statuses/replies method as it now best practice.
1. http://apiwiki.twitter.com/REST-API-Documentation#statuses/replies
2. http://blog.twitter.com/2009/03/replies-are-now-mentions.htmlCode on,
Doug Williams
Twitter API Support
http://twitter.com/dougw
Tags: @replies, mentions, twitter
A video about us from the Wadja perspective
Posted by paulk | Filed under Information
That video is actually the first time that I have ever seen Alex. Its pretty cool to see how both of us working in partnership help us grow. We have great respect for the effort that Wadja have put in to handle the messages volumes that we send.
Tags: sms, twe2, twitter, video, wadja
We appear to be working
Posted by paulk | Filed under Information, News
After a couple more emails to Twitter (Thanks Alex), we appear to be working again.
You may get a lot of old messages.
More to follow.
Tags: sms, twe2, twitter, working
Still no updates
Posted by paulk | Filed under News
Just a little status update.
Our service occasionally connects to Twitter and when it does we send the SMS’s for that account. However every request seems to block until it timesout.
We have not had any reponse from Twitter over the weekend and our Ticket still hasn’t been assigned to anyone yet (3 days after being submitted).
We have seperate IP address available to move if the need arises, however, it means that we would not be whitelisted and would suffer from similar problems to what we are having now.
Thank you for your patience.
Paul k
Going Slowly
Posted by paulk | Filed under Information, News
Thanks everyone for your patience. We are as frustrated with the situation as you are.
This is just a small update to the situation. You may be able to log into the twe2 site every once in a while, this may give the illusion that the system is working. The problem is, you were quite lucky to log in; you would have used one of the requests that did not time out against Twitter. Likewise, the system is sending SMS’s when we manage to successfully poll Twitter, but it is at such a slow rate to be considered non-existant.
We have spoken to our hosting provider and we are confident the delay is not on our side of the network, but as always the Internet is an unpredictable beast.
We are in a slightly better situation that we were last night. But the speed at which we seem to connect feels like we are on an acoustic coupler.
Tags: block, delay, problems., twe2, twitter
We are still waiting
Posted by paulk | Filed under Information, News
I have been told by Twitter that it should be working, however it is plainly not working.
I strongly believe the problem lies their end for the following reasons:
- The problem is still the same
- Pings work fine
- The Twitter home page is not accessible
- The Twitter Search is not accessible
- Zend Desk support is available until you try and log in
- All the above work fine on an adjacent IP address.
There is a ticket raised, however as of now 22 hours of first reporting the problem it has not been assigned to anyone or looked at by anyone as far as I can tell.
Its the weekend now, and I strongly suspect that this is unlikely to get fixed.
I would like to thank Alex at Twitter for help to try and resolve the problem
Paul.
ps. This is the set of emails that I have recieved.
2009/3/20 Alex Payne <alex@twitter.com>
Yes, should have been.
> Hi Alex,
>
> Thanks for the update. Do you know if it has been unblocked? I am
> presuming not because I can only sporadically get to the twitter homepage.
>
> Cheers,
> Paul
>
> 2009/3/20 Alex Payne <alex@twitter.com>
>>
>> No, the blocking was accidental.
>>
>> On Fri, Mar 20, 2009 at 14:44, Paul Kinlan <paulk@twe2.com> wrote:
>> > Hi Guys,
>> >
>> > Thanks for sorting this, I am just curious, did the way we query twitter
>> > cause any thing to trip and cause the block to occur. I am keen to work
>> > on
>> > this from our end to reduce the chance of this happening again.
>> >
>> > Many Thanks,
>> > Paul.
>> >
>> > 2009/3/20 Alex Payne <alex@twitter.com>
>> >>
>> >> Should be unblocked soon, says ops. Their mistake. Sorry!
>> >>
>> >> On Fri, Mar 20, 2009 at 01:55, Paul Kinlan <paulk@twe2.com> wrote:
>> >> > Hi Matt/Alex,
>> >> >
>> >> > All Twe2 users are unable to log in to the application, with our
>> >> > server
>> >> > being unable to contact twitter. Have we been blocked? Our IP
>> >> > address
>> >> > is:
>> >> > 92.63.133.121
>> >> >
>> >> > Kind Regards,
>> >> > Paul
>> >> >
>> >>
>> >>
>> >>
>> >> –
>> >> Alex Payne – API Lead, Twitter, Inc.
>> >> http://twitter.com/al3x
>> >
>> >
>>
>>
>>
>> –
>> Alex Payne – API Lead, Twitter, Inc.
>> http://twitter.com/al3x
>
>
–
Alex Payne – API Lead, Twitter, Inc.
http://twitter.com/al3x
We should be back on shortly
Posted by paulk | Filed under News
Just to let everyone know I have been informed that we should be back on shortly. It appears we might have been blocked by accident.
A full breakdown of the events will be in a post later. I am just working on trying not to get everyone bombed by old SMS’s when we restart again.
Paul k
