Tweetkite’s posterous

Tweetkite users may have experienced unannounced unavailability or slow services starting at approximately 9:15PM on Friday, October 16th 2009 and continueing until 9:45PM, PDT on Friday, October 16th 2009.

The root cause of the issue was hardware failure with our hosting service provider, a situation out of Tweetkites controll. No data was lost during the incident, and tweets scheduled for posting while the system was down, were queued and posted to Twitter shortly after 9:45PM PDT.

We apologize for any inconvience to our users.

With this issue, Tweetkite uptime in the month of October currently stands at 99.61%.

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Our period of closed beta testing is now over and an invitation to try Tweetkite.com is extended to all interested Twitter users. Try it out at http://bit.ly/tweetkite

Since we aren't finished developing the system, please give us your feedback through GetSatisfaction!

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We are delighted to announce that Tweetkite today has been whitelisted by Twitter for volume calls to the Twitter API.

Whitelisting means that Tweetkite now can proceed in rolling out our services to the Twitter community on a far larger scale than todays closed beta.

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Tweetkite has installed customized uptime monitoring with Pingdom. Pingdom offers reliable server, network and website monitoring. They offer a global network of servers that monitor our site 24/7, all year long. The service includes statistics for uptime and response time, and send alerts to Tweetkite staff in the event of an unplanned service interruption. Tweetkite realtime server status is publicly available here.

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Yesterday @twitterapi posted un update about an update they are rolling out, witout taking the system down. RT @twitterapi Today's downtime http://bit.ly/i0m7D will affect the API and OAuth http://bit.ly/16VPjn.

It seems that the effects of this work still aren't over, and several users are having problems logging in to Tweetkite with OAuth. We apologize for the inconvenience, and can only hope that Twitter will iron out the wrinkles during the remainder of the weekend.

Update (19:14 GMT): RT @twitterapi We are actively debugging the oAuth issues as we speak. Hang in there! ^CE

Update (23:58 GMT): Still no fix for the OAuth bug as far as we can see. Once again, Tweetkite apologize for the inconvenience and wishes Twitter the best of luck fixing this problem.

Update (17.08.2009 11:13 GMT): Twitter will be experiencing intermittent downtime throughout the day due to external causes. Twetkite login will be affected by this.

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Many of Tweetkites users have without doubt experienced the ongoing distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on Twitter. During this attack, API access for 3rd party sites like Tweetkite have been interrupted. There is little we can do other than wish Twitter hte best of luck on fighting the attack, and be patient while they restore service levels.

Thanks for your patience. More information can be found at http://status.twitter.com.

If you are curious about what a DDoS is, take a look at this article over on Mashable.

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Many Twitter services ask you to login with your username and password. They then save these for later use when posting to Twitter. We believe that there is a considerable risk involved in doing this. Not only do you run the risk of misuse as a result of a third party hacking the service. It also implies that you have to change your password when something unwanted happens. The TwitViewer case is an example of this.

There is a far better, more secure solution!

At Tweetkite we don't ask you for your twitter account login information. In stead, we use Twitter for logging in. Users login with Twitter OAuth, and logout is done by hitting "Logout" up in the right corner of you screen. Tweetkite only saves two tokens identifying the users Twitter account. This is Twitters recommended authentication method, and secures all users controll over thier account information. You only give Tweetkite the information we need to post your tweets, and you can revoke this authorization when you please. All the applications you have given access to your Twitter account are listed under the Twitter Account Settings.

If you are interested, you can read more about OAuth over at Twitter.

And while we are talking about security: for your safety, if you are inactive on Tweetkite for more than 1 hour, your session will time out and you will automatically be logged out. This is to prevent account misuse, in case you are on a shared computer.

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On Tweetkite we have imposed a few volume limits to stay in accordance with Twitters policies. Our take is not necessarily the only right one and we would love your feedback. Please send us a comment on GetSatisfaction!

Tweetkite is committed to fighting unwanted content and spam. We therefor believe that volume limits should be kept significantly below a level that would constitute spamming. Posting duplicate content at high volumes also constitutes spam. At any rate, Twitter will ignore attempts to perform a duplicate update. With each update attempt, Twitter compares the update text with the authenticating user's last successful update, and ignores any attempts that would result in duplication. Therefore, a user cannot submit the same status twice in a row. Tweetkite users are advised to post varying content, that is both relevant and useful to their followers.

Twitter imposes several limits on users, and some limits are specifically for API-use. The limits currently imposed by Twitter are

• 1,000 total updates per day, on any and all devices (web, mobile web, phone, API, etc.)
• 250 total direct messages per day, on any and all devices
• 150 API requests per hour

The total updates and API request limits are both relevant for Tweetkite use and the system is designed within these limits. Currently Tweetkite limits let you schedule a maximum total of tweets pr hour safely below the Twitter limits through a combination of one-off, hourly, dayly and weekly tweets. This will give sufficient room for you to maximise the use of Tweetkite, and still have plenty of capacity to tweet from other platforms.

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Loads of great people have been signing up for the first round of beta testing all summer. Today Tweetkite has opened for testing with a limited number of test accounts.

We are now accepting requests for the next round. Please send us an e-mail where you tell us what you do, and why you wish to participate. You can also tweet your request by including @tweetkite. You could, for example, say this: @tweetkite Just signed up for http://tweetkite.com beta.

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