After several months of long nights of programming on Red Bull, vast amounts of chocolate and attempting not to neglect my lovely girlfriend Hannah. HootMonitor is finally out in beta form!

So you might be wondering what HootMonitor is. Well to put it incredibly simple its website monitoring for Twitter. But to go into a longer explanation I am going to grab  quote from the about page:

Want to know when your website goes down? How about being notified with a Twitter direct message, e-mail or an SMS? How about some statistics too? HootMonitor can do it all. To set your site up just follow the 3 simple steps above (see the homepage for the images). Or watch the video tour below.

This is the first site I have done based on the “Freemium” business model. Basically you HootMonitor offers basic the basic web monitoring service for free, while charging a premium for advanced/special features.

The easiest way to check out HootMonitor is to login with your Twitter/Facebook account and have a look. Or you can see the introductory video below. Or see it on YouTube.

Did you know that Twitter attempted to secretly release a new feature to a small percentage of users (less than 5%)? The chances are that you did, but if you didn’t check out this Mashable article about Twitter Lists. They will be releasing the lists feature to 5% of people over the next few weeks.

When Twitter release new features, or are planning a new feature, they give developers new API methods to test out. This was the case for Lists. Developers have been given access to a draft API documentation.

So with a combination of being one of the small fraction of users given access to Lists I also saw the draft Lists API, I thought I could make an app as proof of concept of what can be done. The result was ListLeages.

One of my old Twitter apps TwitterLeague (which I no longer own or operate) was built before Lists was even an idea and so if you wanted to create a league of Twitter users you had to login to Twitterleague and add users individually. But now with ListLeagues you can create your lists on Twitter and turn them into leagues by matching the uri (the bit after http://twitter.com)

So for instance I have a league at http://twitter.com/ollieparsley/hootware. If I wanted to create a league from this list all I do is substitute twitter.com for listleagues.com. So the URL would become http://listleagues.com/ollieparsley/hootware

Alternatively you can see w

What is the Twitter Developer Nest?

It’s a great place for Twitter developers, potential developers and Twitter enthusiasts to get together, hear what each other is doing, drink lots of free beer and eat lots of free pizza!

Why do I like it?

Anyone that knows me knows that I am a bit of a serial Twitter app developer. Just look at my projects page to see what sort of app I develop. Most of my friends don’t really know much about what I do apart from “being a geek”. So coming to an event like this where everyone is on the same page and being such a niche group of UK (mainly) Twitter developers, its great to be a part of.

Highlights

All the talks were great and it is a bit bad of me to only choose a couple of presentations, but to hell with it! Here are my favourite 2 apps.

@picfog

Think the Live TweetMeme stream of links, but for photos instead. Just visit picfog.com to see exactly what I mean. I was very impressed with the speed and realising that noone has done anything similar, imagine the possibilities of breaking news from a photo (like the Hudson plane crash) but you see it straight away rather than waiting for the viral effect of Retweets. See photos from the Developer Nest on picfog.com

@twase

@jchivers presented Twase, the awesome Twitter Spam engine. It’s along the lines of what Akismet is to WordPress (except Akismet is owned by WordPress and installed by default!). Twase is a developer tool for checking to see if a user is full of spam! Ok its a lot more complicated then that, but check out twase.com for more info. Check out the presentation.

@twfeed

I was looking forward to this talk from @mario, the creator of TwitterFeed as soon as I saw the schedule. Check out the presentation for more.

HootMonitor

Amongst all the presentations going on there are 8 “show and tells” these are 140 second demos/presentations by anyone who wants to showcase what they have done. I chose to do a quick demo of my latest Twitter app caleed HootMonitor. It’s almost ready and you can see more at HootMonitor.com or follow @HootMonitor on Twitter.

Live stream!

There was a live stream up on Ustream.tv that I have included below. If you want to see my HootMonitor demo, skip to the last two minutes of the video!

Ok so you might have just dropped it in some shallow water. Here is what you should do in the “rules according to Ollie”. Obviously if you have dropped it in water and have taken the time to find this blog post then it is probably too late for you. But if you are reading this for info then follow these rules:

1. Get it out the water! By now you will be getting odd messages saying “This accessory is not compatible with iPhone” (like below)
2. Wrap it in a towel to get the surface water off
3. Put the phone on a coat in the footwell of your car
4. Drive a long distance, whist:
   1. Blasting heat into the footwell of the passenger seat
   2. Opening the windows so you don’t boil
5. Sorted!

There you go. That was exactly what I did on Friday morning and it worked perfectly when I got to the end of the journey. The only thing I am not sure about is insurance. Although I obviously have needed to make a claim, internally there would be signs of water damage which would make the insurance invalid. I am hoping to get clrification on Monday when I take a trip to the O2 store.

It’s just under 5 minutes long and you can download the MP3 if you like. Or put the RSS feed into iTunes (or another generic player) to receive it as a podcast . I hope its not too boring!

Download audio file (001.mp3)

Thanks.

Ollie

After attending the Twitter Developer Nest (which I recommend you attend), where I talked about FootyTweets (see my presentation here), there was a discussion about how the Twitter API handles user avatars.

The main problem is that the URL that is given in the API is a direct URL to the image. So if the user changes their image after your API call is done, you will get a broken image/404.

I have this problem with TwitterLeague and have to run a 30 minute update to check for users avatars. This also means that an avatar could be broken for up to 30 minutes. In Twitter land this is obviously a long time.

So Twavatars (twitter.com/twavatarsapi) is my solution. Whenever you want to display a users avatar instead of doing an API call you instead use a Twavatar URL, this collects the relevant users image (depending on the size) and returns an image. This means the URL can be used directly in an <img>.

This is an example URL (i am looking at getting a domain name):
http://twavatars.info/user/10721822?s=thumb

It returns this image:

I think its a nice way of handling Twitter avatars. If you want to know more please head to http://twavatars.info

But I did have an awesome time at the Twitter Developer Nest. I am briefly going to summarise the parts of the day that really got me thinking.

Zolty
The first presentation was by @zolty where he showed us BakerTweet and how he used an Arduino unit to create a tool that was installed at the Bakery over the road from his office. The unit sends out a tweet when a baker takes something out the overn, chooses the item on the unit and presses the send button.

It was a really great presentation and really opens up the number of opportunities for this unit. Zolty did mention that there is a unit being tested at London Zoo where a tweet will be sent out when an animal is being fed.

ME!
I spoke second and talked about my various Twitter apps but went on to talk in-depth about the FootyTweets Cease and Desist issues. I have included the presentation below.

Doug Williams
@dougw is part of the Twitter API team and focuses on support. He breifly went into some of the technical details into why there have been problems since Aston Kutcher and Oprah (with a lot of other factors) increased Twitters traffic exponentially.

He also answered a number of questions from the audience. There were a few issues that were raised including Twitter Avatars and syncing.

Paul Johnston
Paul (@PaulDJohnston) did a really interesting talk about Transient and Persinstant data on Twitter. It was quote in-depth and he went into how to best make use of Twitter avatars. I have embedded his presentation below.

Show & Tweet
After the main talks it was time for show and tweet, you have 140 seconds to talk about your app. I can only remember a couple of the demos so please accept my appologies if your app isn’t listed. Please tell me in the comments!

• TweetMeme API
• Peepwl
• TweetRaffle (in development)
• TwitApps

Then it was off to the pub! I did get to talk to a number of people and would really like to thank everyone there who talked to me but in particular @stut. We discussed Twitter apps and scaling for almost 2 hours and barely stopped for air!

The first event especially for the Twitter development community will take place on the evening of Tuesday 24th March at Sun Microsystem’s Customer Briefing Centre in London. The event will be developer centric with the content best suited to people who are already developing applications on top of Twitter or who intend to start building a Twitter application in the near future.

Even Twitter Co-founder, Biz Stone (@biz) thinks the idea is great:

We’re looking forward to the cool projects that will be hatched at the Twitter Developer Nest. The work coming out of the Twitter developer community is not only inspiring—it also creates important variety for users.

After the success of the first event there is now a second event on the 30th of April and tickets are £5 each. But the best bit is that I will be there doing a talk! My talk will be about developing a Twitter app on a budget and whats going on with FootyTweets.

You can grab your tickets using the eventbrite page.

The whole lineup is as follows:

• Zolty (@aszolty), Poke London – BakerTweet
• Ollie Parsley (@ollieparsley), Freelance – FootyTweets
• Doug Williams (@dougw), Twitter Inc. – Twitter API Q&A
• Paul Johnston (@PaulDJohnston), Vida – Transient v. Persistent Data on Twitter
• Show & Tweet – 8 x 140 second demos – Reserve your spot on the night.
• Food, Drink & Networking

The last section means that you can pop along and speak for 140 seconds about your Twitter development project or idea. Let me know if you are going to come along. Or if you have any questions. Don’t forget to follow the events twitter account @devnest! The event is also streamed on UStream.tv, you can see the last events clips on the UStream.tv page.

Specs:

• Cost: £1500 ish
• Hard drived: 80/120/160/250 GB or 64GB SSD
• Processor: Core 2 Duo
• RAM: 1GB or 2GB
• Display: 1280 x 800 display (portrait)
• Operating System: Windows XP
• Connectivity: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and 3G
• Security: Impact detection and fingerprint recognition

Video review: