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Our Twitter application were featured on a Singapore local daily, MyPaper, yesterday.

Tweet easy, thanks to free S’pore applications

MyPaper, 16 Apr 2009

CHEN JINGTING

TWITTER fans here have created applications for fellow tweeting Singaporeans to “tweet” conveniently and securely – for free. These third-party applications are mainly for Twitter users who update their profiles via SMS. Tweet.sg, started by software engineer Jym Cheong about three months ago, has more than 700 users.

A user only has to send his password and message to a designated number. A program will then copy the SMS message onto his Twitter account online. “Tweet.sg updates the account on behalf of the user,” said Mr Cheong, who designed the program. The 33-year-old told my paper that he is not making money from tweet.sg. If a user has free SMS as part of his mobile-phone plan, he does not need to pay a cent when he uses tweet.sg, he said.

If the user exceeds his free SMS limit, charges are paid to the telecommunication companies, not tweet.sg.
So why did he start tweet.sg? To save money for local Twitter users, he said. Initially, users needed to send their SMSes to a number in the United Kingdom, which can incur expensive international SMS charges. A similar Singapore-based site, Widgeo.us, which provides web technology-based solutions, introduced its free Twitter application last October. Currently, nearly 700 fans are using the application. It stores and encrypts users’ passwords in its system to protect their privacy and prevent misuse of information, said co-founder Chua U-Zyn, 26. Tweet.sg also has its own security measures.

Mr Cheong said: “Once the SMS reaches the system, it is not stored and is sent to Twitter. Whether the attempt is successful or not, the system would delete the SMS so that no trace of it is left.” Mr Chua hopes that Widgeo.us would be able to access users’ online account information without requiring their login information in the future. “Then they don’t have to give us their passwords, which means greater security and user privacy.”

jtchen@sph.com.sg

Do check out our just-improved Twitter application.

Widgeous is currently undergoing some changes and you shall hear from us soon on our new updates!

Thanks for all your support!

After a long absence and many bugs. We’ve just reworked the Twitter Bridge app that we had. Now, it’s even easier to use it because there’s NO NEED for a widgeous account.

If you want to:-

Use twitter on your Singapore mobile phone:-

1. Send “twitter register” to 92721192

2. You will receive a reply asking you for your TWITTER EMAIL
E.g. If your email is “xyz@wer.com” you just send a reply “xyz@wer.com” to 92721192

3. The system will then ask you for your TWITTER PASSWORD. Just like in step (2), reply with your twitter password.

4. Once that’s done, you can send updates by texting

“twitter update I tweeted this from my mobile!”

Use twitter on MSN

1. add the widgeous bot (w@widgeo.us) to your contact list.

2. say to the bot, “twitter register”

3. Just like in the mobile phone registration, he will ask you for your twitter email and password.

4. If all goes well, you can now send twitter updates by messaging to the bot,

“twitter update I tweeted this from MSN”

Notes

1. We store your twitter password so that you won’t have to retype your twitter keys over and over again. Don’t worry, we keep your twitter details safe.

2. If you want to associate any of your devices(phone/msn) with another twitter account, simply run the “twitter register” command again.

You know how you could just send a twitter update to +447624801423 ? If you were in Singapore, wouldn’t it be good if you could send that update to a local number instead? Well now you can.

First, our number is +6592721192

By simply registering for the app using the

“twitter register”
command you can register for our twitter app. Once you’ve done that, you can simply use

“twitter update Hi! This is a twitter update”
to send updates to your twitter account!

In fact, we’ll also send your twitter account feed to your default channel as well! If you’ve set it to your mobile phone, you’ll get updates on your phone!

WARNING: if you have a lot of followers follow a lot of people who tweet a lot, you’re advised to set your default channel to another channel because the app currently doesn’t follow your twitter notifications list(there’s no API for us to use) so we’re basically sending all updates that appear in your twitter.com/home page to you.

Setting your default channel to your MSN or Widgeous Channel makes it function like an IM notification client.

If at any point in time, you think you want to stop receiving updates, you can just use the command “twitter unregister” to stop receiving updates.

Oh, one last thing. Our system only sends text messages to Singapore numbers only. If you’re outside of Singapore, you can still send commands via text messages but you will not receive any updates.

Another limitation includes not supporting the twitter direct message. I’ll do this one up soon, and update everyone when I’ve plugged this in.

If you have any suggestions for improvement, just drop me an email or leave a comment.

I start by apologising to everyone for not writing since the day we were preparing for the Broadcast Asia 2008 exhibition. I told myself that if we were going to have a blog, we should blog. It shouldn’t be a press release site. It shouldn’t be an announcement page. It should be about engagement. Well, I’ll try to make amends from now on. If I’m screwing up, feel free to drop me an email to let me know.

So here goes.

I’m glad to say that since BroadcastAsia, we’ve completed building the Widgeous core - that means to say it can stand on it’s now although we will keep improving it and I’m sure we will learn of it’s limitations as we proceed to scale. From there, we’ve moved towards wanting to attract developers to start building applications on our platform.

In that respect, we recently went over to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to be part of their inaugural Barcamp(which I have to say, was friggin awesome!) If there’s anything I took away from that session it must be the fact that the culture of sharing knowledge coupled with a sense of dissatisfaction is critical to innovation. We left KL with a sense of excitement that we would be going back to continue work on Widgeous and yet with a certain sadness that it would be some time before we see the next Barcamp Malaysia happen.

And since we’ve come back, we’ve had to think about solving our next set of problems - how to gain traction? You see, we’ve always had a chicken and egg problem, We need the users and the developers - but we’ve always needed them both at the same time. That is so not going to happen. And so we shifted our focus on trying to get the developers on board first but still, that’s not working. We sat and we figured:

1. People don’t entirely understand what we do.
2. People don’t have a real example of what the Widgeous Platform can do(this is made worse by [1] ).
3. People don’t have time to explore…and we haven’t really made that process much easier.

So we made a few decisions. Amongst those:-

1. We’re going to spend more time creating real in-house applications. Some of which will released in the coming weeks. This will aimed at providing both a case study and an experience for users.
2. We’re going to provide a more dedicated area for developers to find out about how they can be part of our system and guide them into learning how to use our APIs.
3. We’re going to provide a more friendly channel for communication with you - mainly a forum.
4. We’re going to provide a place on Widgeous for non-developers to actually do useful stuff and slowly get introduced to our work.

If all goes well, we’ll make our first release tomorrow afternoon…Just need to check some things with the rest of the team when I get into the office tomorrow morning.

I’m also thinking of meeting up(either online or offline) in small groups just to get feedback on some of our internal product development plans/products that are in development now. Coffee joints probably work offline but do you know what online tool( or collection of tools) are good for having online demos & discussion? Anyone interested?

Broadcast Asia is tomorrow and we’re here setting up the equipment… I’ve never been inside the setting up area of such a huge scale event before and it’s quite an eye opener.

It’s just amazing how so many people can set up like 8 entire halls worth of stuff in like…48 hours?

Ok. Ok. Let’s just let the pictures do the talking…

Ridz gets really excited looking at what’s on screen…

 
Last minute set up. All systems go? Almost.

Remember the game? Here are some screenshots.

Ok. Back to ‘trying’ to work…See ya there~!