I’ve been wanting to write this post for quite a while - I’ve just never sat down and actually done it. So, here we go.
As TwitKit surpasses 6.1 thousand downloads, I keep wondering how this got started. I’m amazed at how this software has taken off - how much publicity and praise it has earned in the past months.
TwitKit was born in late April 2008, in the wordpress-chat IRC channel. It was Guy Lewin and I, casually talking. I had been using the Tweetbar extension in Firefox for quite a while - I had been constantly looking for a good Linux Twitter client (as my main computer runs Linux). Tweetbar was the closest thing I could find to a good-quality client, and it satisfied my tweeting needs for a week or two. But soon, I grew impatient and took a look at Tweetbar’s source. I had never developed a Firefox extension before, but it seemed simple enough - just some JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.
So I talked to Guy about it, and he seemed to like the idea of branching Tweetbar into a new project. We talked about it for a bit, and eventually he came up with the name ‘TwitKit.’
We instantly got excited - the name sounded really good, and Guy quickly checked that it wasn’t already used. I hastily registered @twitkit and went to bed soon after.
The next morning, I could be found hacking away, adding features and improving some of the already-existing features in the extension. Soon after checking with the GPL 2 License (which Tweetbar used) I redistributed the modified version of the extension in a very unofficial manner. I sent the file out to a few people over IM, and they seemed to like it, so I also made a post on my old blog.
I’m not sure when I had the idea to actually formalize the extension - but I figured I should do it just to get it done. I quickly coded a nice, simplistic site for TwitKit - simplicity one of its core virtues - and published it. I put up the ‘1.0 beta’ version for download, and it slowly chugged along.
I got a few die-hard supporters in the first month, and for them I am ever grateful. I don’t know how I was lucky enough for some of these people to be bloggers - they spread the word on Twitter and their own sites about this upcoming Twitter app.
Soon after the first beta (a few days, actually) I released a second beta that fixed a large amount of bugs I had carelessly overlooked in the first beta. I gained about 100 downloads this time, and this really excited me. I jumped right into the development of the final 1.0 version, ready to go.
But somewhere during the development, I lost a little faith in TwitKit. I’m not sure what happened, but something just made me back away from TwitKit for a little while. I wasn’t sure where I was going with this - I looked at the many other available Twitter apps and just felt depressed about making yet another one.
I would work on TwitKit about twice a week, occasionally changing things in the source code and making enhancements.
At around the beginning of June 2008 I started to get interested in TwitKit again. Things changed, and I was back on track. I submitted TwitKit to the Mozilla Add-ons site somewhere near June 10th, and patiently waited for it to be accepted.
Well, I got very impatient here. After about a week I decided to publish TwitKit on my own, and then switch over to Mozilla Add-ons once it had been approved. When TwitKit 1.0 was released, visits to the product’s site increased by over 1000 percent. I was astonished at the attention it got - this was so much more than I expected. Soon enough we passed 3000 downloads, and we kept the pace going, passing 4000 soon after. The TwitKit community grew at an explosive rate, so exponentially that I wasn’t sure if I could keep up with it.
About a week ago, Guy Lewin asked if he could join TwitKit’s development team. I had kind of been pretending that it was a ‘team’ up to that time - there were two other developers, but neither of them were active. I gladly accepted his offer, and soon enough we were happily working together. The pace of TwitKit’s development increased almost two fold, and both of us were enjoying it.
And that’s where the unfinished story ends. There will certainly be more to learn, just not yet. We (yes, it’s a real team now!) have some great new features set up for TwitKit 1.1 - many more additions than we had in TwitKit 1.0. I’m very excited for this next release, whose date is yet to be decided.
Let me just say one more thing before you go… I am ever so grateful for all that I have received and earned since TwitKit was started. This is a billion times more attention than what I expected TwitKit to get, and I will never be able to stop saying ‘thank you’ for all the help you, and the rest of the TwitKit community, has given me. Every download and every visit to TwitKit’s site makes me so happy - I just can’t explain it. This has been a heart-touching experience for me, and I hope it will continue.
Thank you.
