Where to archive your tweets
It’s great to see more people get access to their full archive of tweets from Twitter. In addition to just having a copy of your own tweets, it can be useful to go back and browse them by date, or search for something specific. I’d suggest putting the HTML version online as-is (mine’s here), and also checking out other apps that add a variety of different features on top of the basic archive.
Both of my apps — Tweet Library for iOS and Watermark for the web — can now import the .zip file you receive from Twitter. This file contains your full archive of tweets and retweets. Both apps can load the file directly from Dropbox, making it as simple as possible to get the tweets imported. And both apps are smart about only importing tweets that haven’t been stored yet, so you don’t have to worry about duplicates.
To import into Tweet Library, first download the archive from your settings page on twitter.com. Inside Tweet Library click on the blue arrow icon next to “Archives” and walk through the steps to authorize your account with Dropbox. Then copy the .zip file from Twitter to Dropbox → Apps → Tweet Library. It will show up in Tweet Library and can be selected.
Tweet Library is good if you want easy access to your tweets on the iPhone or iPad. You can search your tweets, create filters for them, and add tweets to special collections to share with others. It also doubles as a full Twitter client, with a timeline, posting, Instapaper support, and plenty more. Check it out in the iOS App Store.
To import into Watermark, also download the archive from Twitter and put it on Dropbox. You can put it anywhere, either in Apps → Watermark if you’ve already authorized Watermark to use Dropbox (for export), or in Documents or anywhere else. Then sign in to Watermark and click Account → “Upload all your tweets” to select the file.
Watermark is good if you want to expand your archive beyond just your own tweets. It indexes tweets from everyone you are following, creating a huge searchable archive over time. My own account in Watermark now has about 400,000 tweets indexed. Sign up or learn more at watermark.io.
January 21, 2013 04:22 PM [link]
What makes App.net special
Phillip Gruneich has an interesting post about what’s different about ADN, with thoughts on the global feed and link posting:
“App.net is a different environment and it must be preserved that way. If you get into it and decide to behave like it is a Twitter alternative, then the differences will fade away and we’ll lose a precious experience.”
There are some ideas in here that surprised me. For example, I’m not sure I agree that everyone reads the global feed, nor that people should be discouraged from linking to anything but their own work. I love to post links to products from friends and companies that are doing interesting things.
Even if it isn’t as busy as on Twitter — Twitter disabled their global feed years ago when it started moving too fast to be read — it would still be difficult to do anything more than occasionally skim the global feed on ADN.
He does hit on something important, though. Because it’s a paid service, and there’s a cost to additional accounts, most of the users are actual people. There are fewer companies and parody accounts. (But I did end up getting @riverfold on ADN, which I felt was a nice compromise when compared against my 4-5 app accounts on Twitter.)
So I might not use ADN in exactly the same way that Phillip does, but the hope that ADN remains unique is the same because it’s something nearly everyone on ADN probably hopes for. And that’s the really good news: if what makes ADN special is the people, then it’s because all of the people have something in common. They didn’t chose ADN by accident, or because it was the default choice. They chose it because they wanted something better.
In the short 5 months since I wrote about ADN’s start, I’ve become a big fan of the founders, the quality of the API and developer program, and the general tone of ADN users. There might not be a single best way to use ADN, and that will become even more true over time as the scope of the API grows. But there’s no question that it is a special service that deserves to be a peer with Twitter and Facebook in terms of new apps and conversations, even as it exists in a different world where huge “1 billion user” scale doesn’t matter.
January 21, 2013 01:22 PM [link]
Tweet Library 2.2
I posted a couple months ago about my experiment to cut the price of Tweet Library in half. I’ve decided to make this decision permanent. Tweet Library is just $4.99 as a universal app for both iPhone and iPad.
Today I’m also releasing Tweet Library 2.2. This version gains a few improvements and bug fixes, but most importantly a big new feature: support for importing Twitter’s new archive format. It does this by downloading the .zip file you receive from Twitter directly via Dropbox, to make it easy to import your full archive of tweets. (Watermark has this feature too.)
Not everyone has access to exporting their tweets from Twitter yet, but I wanted to get this feature out as soon as possible. And I already have a version 2.2.1 submitted to Apple with more improvements to the import process.
See the web site for more about Tweet Library, or get it at the App Store here.
January 16, 2013 09:10 PM [link]
Aaron Swartz
I met Aaron briefly at SXSW, maybe 8 or 9 years ago, when the conference was still so small you could run into everyone. He wouldn’t remember me, but I followed his work and linked to him a couple times here. He was so young and already doing great things.
Lawrence Lessig:
“He was brilliant, and funny. A kid genius. A soul, a conscience, the source of a question I have asked myself a million times: What would Aaron think?”
Brent Simmons:
“He’d gone on to do cool things — and make some mistakes, and get in trouble for them. But I knew he was extraordinary, and I expected him to grow up to become an American hero.”
Cory Doctorow:
“Aaron had an unbeatable combination of political insight, technical skill, and intelligence about people and issues. I think he could have revolutionized American (and worldwide) politics. His legacy may still yet do so.”
Daniel Jalkut:
“After witnessing a small extent of the struggles Aaron fought, I choose to commemorate him with gratitude for the many bad weeks when he resisted drastic action, and gave us all more time to appreciate and share his contributions.”
…and:
“You’ve honored Aaron Swartz by acknowledging what he did before he died. Now honor him by doing what he might have done.”
Such a loss. For more links, I started a collection of tweets when my timeline woke up to the news of Aaron’s death.
January 15, 2013 09:03 AM [link]
Business vs. user experience
Some companies seem willing to do anything for a profit. The worst domain name registrars and their pages filled with up-sells. News blogs that spread articles across several sections to increase page views. We see examples all the time of blatant attempts to increase sales just a little at the expense of usability.
But the reverse can also be a mistake. For example, my own Tweet Marker. I wanted the setup user experience to be so effortless that the user merely needs to flip a switch to enable it in their favorite apps, or do nothing for the apps that choose to use Tweet Marker by default. There’s no formal registration, no prompt for an email address.
Now I find myself with 500,000 total users who have tried Tweet Marker, but no way to follow up with them to see if they are interested in upgrading to the $1/month subscriber plan. The service is, frankly, a financial failure. More like a charity experiment than a business.
I’ve been giving this a lot of thought, and introducing the subscriber plan was the latest part of a renewed effort with Tweet Marker. I’m determined to make it work, even if it’s too late to shift the balance between business needs and user experience to something that makes more sense.
January 14, 2013 09:35 AM [link]
Three months without Twitter
Over three months ago I stopped using Twitter. I wanted to make a statement — perhaps in an overly-dramatic way — that the developer-hostile environment that Twitter had evolved into wasn’t something I could support anymore. I do still read plenty of tweets while testing Watermark, and I’m almost done with a new version of Tweet Library, because my customers deserve great Twitter features. But I haven’t tweeted, retweeted, or favorited a thing from my personal account since October 5th.
I knew that sometimes it would be difficult to resist going back to Twitter, replying to a question, or cross-posting my posts from App.net. So I set things up to discourage my future self from even considering more tweeting. I picked the 1-year anniversary of the day Steve Jobs died and wrote my final tweets a week in advance. If someone visits my profile, I want those statements to be what they see. I can’t tweet again without pushing those tweets from the top of the list.
Meanwhile, App.net started taking off. Netbot shipped. The developer incentive program started to directly reward developers. There’s a good community there. It’s smaller than on Twitter; there isn’t the same never-ending stream of tweets flowing into your timeline. But maybe that’s a good thing.
The flip side is that it’s hard to let go of things like Twitter that have value. I had similar self-doubt when I killed off my app Wii Transfer, so that I could focus on bigger ideas. But simplifying has allowed me to do some of the best work of my career in 2012. I’ve put everything I have into Watermark, into the new Tweet Marker subscriptions, into doing Core Intuition weekly, into shipping everything I work on. 2013 is going to be awesome, and I’m not looking back.
January 11, 2013 12:07 PM [link]
iDeveloper Live Christmas podcast
Daniel and I took a week off from Core Intuition for the holidays, but I was a guest on the iDeveloper Live podcast last week for an end of year show with Scotty, John Fox, Saul Mora, Brent Simmons, and Guy English. Topics included highlights from the year’s events, what projects we’re working on now, learning from Apple’s successes and failures, predictions for 2013, and some detours into Auto Layout, Core Data, iCloud, and other new APIs.
Here’s the episode on iDeveloper TV with the audio and links to all the guests.
Even though I’ve been podcasting for years, I think this was the first podcast I’ve been on that was actually broadcast live. It was a fun show. Check out the iDeveloper Live web site for previous episodes and to subscribe.
December 27, 2012 11:23 AM [link]
Safari extension for Tweet Marker
Since introducing the Tweet Marker $1/month subscriber plan earlier this week, I’ve received a few questions about how the Safari extension works, and whether Watermark customers will also receive the new features. Yes, Watermark subscribers automatically have access to the Tweet Marker extension, which can be downloaded here.
I’ve prepared a screencast to show how the extension works. It’s about a minute long, and you can view it right here.
Thanks to everyone who has already subscribed to either Tweet Marker or Watermark.
December 19, 2012 09:29 AM [link]
Tweet Marker new subscriber plan
The original goal for Tweet Marker Plus was to help cover the hosting costs for Tweet Marker. It succeeded for a little while, but it also ended up evolving into a larger independent service: Watermark, with much higher hosting costs for archiving and search, and a bunch of new features like App.net support, Dropbox sync, saved collections, and more. I’m really excited about the future of Watermark.
I also hear from Tweet Marker users who don’t need Watermark. They still want to support Tweet Marker, though, to make sure it continues running and that it’s as fast as possible.
So today I’m introducing a separate, inexpensive subscription option for Tweet Marker. Just $1/month! You can subscribe from the new Tweet Marker home page. And as a bonus you’ll get the first official Safari extension for Tweet Marker, shown in this screenshot:
December 17, 2012 08:24 AM [link]
Posting from Watermark
Watermark now has App.net posting, replying, and an improved UI for tweeting. You could always tweet from Watermark, but it used Twitter’s “web intents” system, which opens a new browser window. The new interface is integrated directly into the Watermark sidebar, and it works with both App.net and Twitter.
Here’s what it looks like when it’s visible:
November 30, 2012 05:39 PM [link]
Watermark quick copy and more
Watermark had some downtime early last week. While I was able to bring back the server faster and hopefully more robust than ever, I also wanted to quickly act to improve the service in visible ways. So I wrapped up a few features for Watermark over the Thanksgiving break, including two specific new features for Twitter and App.net.
For Twitter: Copying tweets to custom collections was cumbersome before, involving lots of clicks if you are copying multiple tweets in a row. Now there’s a faster way. After you copy a tweet to a collection, Watermark remembers that recent collection for a couple minutes and offers a “quick copy” link directly next to the tweet.
For App.net: You can now repost or star a post directly from the Watermark interface. I’ll continue to fill out Watermark with more features like this, whether you’re living in Watermark as your default client, or just searching your archive and want access to more functionality.
Search and performance should also be better across the board.
November 26, 2012 05:11 PM [link]
Tweet Library price follow-up
Last month I tried an experiment, lowering the price of Tweet Library for the first time in 2 years. It wasn’t selling well and I wanted to do something to determine if I was just stubbornly pricing it too high or if there was a deeper issue with the quality or marketing of the app. So let’s follow up on whether this was a success or not.
Here’s the graph of revenue for a 2-month period: one month before the price cut and one month after. There was also a new version released about a week after the price cut, but it didn’t appear to have a significant impact on sales.
Downloads were up 175%. Profit was up 40%. My gut feeling is that I should have dropped the price to $7.99 instead of $4.99, but I’m wary of changing anything again right now. We’ll see what next month looks like.
November 14, 2012 05:06 PM [link]
Stream Marker
Watermark now supports App.net’s Stream Marker. You can click a post in Watermark to set its marker, the current marker will be retrieved when refreshing posts from the server, and the “Scroll to marker” link scrolls to the marker or loads more posts trying to find it.
Here’s what a marked post looks like:
I don’t know if any other clients support Stream Marker yet, but I expect many will in their next updates. I thought it was appropriate that I should be one of the first to support it.
I launched Tweet Marker in June of 2011. It wasn’t exactly a new idea — Echofon had a private sync before, and developers had long been asking Twitter for an official timeline position sync API — but Tweet Marker was the first to support sync between different apps. And it was the first to bring this idea to many more users, to make it a must-have feature that customers asked for.
In a way, I think of Stream Marker as a next-generation Tweet Marker, even though it’s not mine. The API and name are different, but it feels familiar, like an evolution from what we learned from Twitter apps. It’s a no-brainer to support it in Watermark.
November 13, 2012 08:15 PM [link]
Apology letters
Great essay from Rands on Scott Forstall. It’s one of the first I’ve seen to capture what made Forstall valuable to innovation at Apple:
“While I’d continued to hear about the disdain amongst the executive ranks about Forstall after I left Apple, I was still shocked about his departure, because while he was in no way Steve Jobs, he was the best approximation of Steve Jobs that Apple had left. You came to expect a certain amount of disruption around him because that’s how business was done at Apple — it was well-managed internal warfare. Innovation is not born out out of a committee; innovation is a fight.”
One part of this executive shakeup that had me puzzled was the rumor that Scott Forstall refused to sign an apology letter about iOS 6 Maps. We’ve had a few open letters from Steve Jobs, and now one from Tim Cook. It seemed out of character to have a VP do it, someone who’s lesser known to the general public.
But then I ran across this letter about EPEAT from Bob Mansfield again, posted just a few months ago. It is signed only by Mansfield. It starts:
“We’ve recently heard from many loyal Apple customers who were disappointed to learn that we had removed our products from the EPEAT rating system. I recognize that this was a mistake. Starting today, all eligible Apple products are back on EPEAT.”
In other words: we’re listening, we’re sorry, and here’s what we’re doing to set things right. And I think that’s Tim Cook’s Apple. Proud and passionate about the products they’ve built, definitely, but always sincere. Arrogance has no place.
November 12, 2012 08:53 AM [link]
Making time for marketing
Like many programmers, I’m often fooled into thinking that it’s enough to build a good product — that people will find it on their own, instantly recognize its value, and pay for it. It’s easy to forget that even great products need marketing to succeed. For a one-man shop it’s important to take a break from writing code and work on how the app is sold.
Building a business is hard. I started Riverfold Software 6 years ago and in many ways it has fallen short. And for some of the past year, I’ve squandered the success of Tweet Marker, failing to practice and experiment with how to make money from it.
Jason Fried of 37signals wrote for Inc Magazine last year about how making money takes practice:
“One thing I do know is that making money is not the same as starting a business. For entrepreneurs, this is an important thing to understand. Most of us identify with the products we create or services we provide. I make software. He is a headhunter. She builds computer networks. But the fact is, all of us must master one skill that supersedes the others: making money. You can be the most creative software designer in the world. But if you don’t know how to make money, you’re never going to have much of a business or a whole lot of autonomy.”
In the last week I’ve taken a couple steps in the right direction. I’ve finally redesigned the Watermark home page around a simpler marketing statement of what the app is about. And as discussed on the recent Core Intuition, I switched from PayPal to Stripe in an effort to make payment smoother and subscriptions easier to track. There’s still a lot to do, but I hope to make even more time for marketing before the year is up.
November 9, 2012 11:27 AM [link]
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