Here’s a brief history of Tweetfave – my new free service that automatically emails your Twitter favorites to your inbox.
This project started as one of those “wouldn’t it be useful if…” projects, as an addition to Twitter. I was already using the Twitter favorite feature to bookmark tweets and links to read later, and wanted a way to automatically receive those (short of going to my profile page and viewing my own favorites). Combine that with an interest in learning the Twitter API, and the project was underway.
As I started writing this, I was a bit surprised as to just how long I’ve been working on this. Here’s the history timeline I came up with:
- First working code: April 2011
- Tweetfave.com domain registered: May 2011
- Start keeping source code in git: October 2011
- Landing page, collect email addresses: October 2011
- Feature survey on Amazon Turk: November 2011
- Real front-end live, “coming soon”: October 2012
- First person other than me using it: April 2013
- Go-live, open for anyone to sign up: May 2013
Yes, you read that correctly: I have been working on Tweetfave for two years!
That seems like a long time. I worked on it in chunks of time, and kept using it myself. I favorited over 5000 tweets in that 2-year period, an average of 50/week! In the back of my mind I kept thinking I should finish this and see if anyone else found it useful. A couple months ago I decided to quit procrastinating and finish this to the point where others could give it a try. In April I finally reached that point and asked a few friends to sign up. After a couple more bugs fixed and a week running without errors, I finally opened it up for everyone.
Now I’ve got a few people actively using it and everything seems to be running smoothly. In a few weeks I’ll post some usage numbers and let’s see how much interest I can generate.
If you haven’t tried Tweetfave yet, give it a shot and let me know what you think.