wejustblog

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!

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.

Since this is my first post on wejustblog, I shall begin with a little self-introduction. I am U-Zyn (http://uzyn.com), the CTO of Widgeo.us. I am head of all things technology-related on Widgeo.us, including the system design of Widgeo.us and management of the development team. Being a part of development team myself, I am also the chief code monkey.

t.widgeo.us

Working at Widgeo.us with a bunch of geeks is not only fun, we sometimes also do crazy things together. t.widgeo.us, is a project Aen, our Art Director, and I made together with the free time we get while working on Widgeo.us.

Like many of you, the team members at Widgeo.us all have personal Twitter accounts. On top of that we also have a combined Widgeo.us account to update our followers with happenings around the company and the development. More often than not we find it a chore to be logging in and out of Twitter just to switch accounts to leave updates for different accounts. If you are like us, now you can manage your Twitter accounts with ease with t.widgeo.us.

As of now, t.widgeo.us is still very new, with quite a limited feature set. Though we like to keep things simple, we would most certainly be happy to hear from you. Aen and I will be spending more of our free time working on it as we go along, most importantly we are looking forward to interface t.widgeo.us with the soon-to-be-launched Widgeo.us.