As any astute reader might be able tell (for the 2 people that read this post) this post is a tad late… almost a year late.
So what happened? I will admit I’m fairly lazy when it comes to blogging, but mostly we let this little twitter app that turned out pretty cool go out into the big wide world and found ourselves in what I like to call the ‘Oh Crap’ period of doing something new.
A lot has happened since Part 1 of this story, we went from a very small alpha of about 25 people to opening open MetroTwit to the public with over 800 users registering to be notified of the beta.
Of course we were wise enough to release the beta in a nice quiet period in our lives so we could easily get bugs fixed and out to all the new users from a lot of different countries. Except we didn’t. We released the MetroTwit beta during the Microsoft ReMix 2010 Conference in Melbourne while were attending sessions and ‘networking’ events at night. Over the 2 days of Remix we released 6 new versions of MetroTwit to combat all kinds of issues with Non-latin Languages, resource hogging and geneal user experience. Overall it was great experience with our first release and we learnt a lot (like controlling Long’s hit the release button)
MetroTwit has been an awesome rollercoaster of fun for everyone involved over the past year. We’re now at over 35,000 users that have tried MetroTwit and we thought it might be a good idea to give everyone an update on the plans for MetroTwit as we move forward. Firstly, this week we announced our great new partnership with Windows Phone 7 Twitter Client, Rowi as part of The Nest and believe me there is lots more to that coming in the coming weeks and months.
One of the most requested features of MetroTwit is some kind of other social network integration, Facebook or Linked in mainly. After a lot of discussions about MetroTwit in regards to changing MetroTwit from a twitter client to a social media client like the other big name clients out there, we have decided to stay as a Twitter Client from a 1st party perspective (even if Twitter doesn’t like clients as much, we still <3 them). This means you won’t see us building in Facebook or LinkedIn directly into MetroTwit.
HOWEVER 🙂 MetroTwit has a plugin architecture that overtime we will be looking to open up to developers which would allow some kind of 3rd party integration with other services (initially this would be for URL/Map and Geo services.)
We have a MASSIVE list of features and requests from all our users (sorry if we don’t get to reply to everyone) and while some probably won’t end up happening, a lot of the ideas are great and we will try to get to implementing them at some point. A lot of people have asked for a list of upcoming features and while we do have a list of what is upcoming, due to our work schedules being quite fluid (we have full time jobs as well) it we don’t like to make feature or timeline promises.
For the future from MetroTwit crew you can expect great new releases with some very cool new features (Streaming, Multi-account and other secrets) for Metrotwit. Thanks for all the support we’ve received recevied so far from users, developers and companies and we hope you’ll continue on this (somewhat) wild ride with us.
Over the next few weeks and months, I’ll be slowly posting a few bits and pieces on the more technical side of MetroTwit with even some code for the Metro/Zune style window, Media Previewing and a few other things, as well as a general how we find WPF to use as a dead language (#fixwpf).