by Sandaruwan Gunathilake

Since twitter is not popular among most of Sri Lankan internet users, I'll explain a little bit about twitter first. You are probably aware of the popular social networking site, facebook. The idea behind facebook is to keep in touch with your friends/family by sharing photos, messaging, playing games, etc. Twitter is quite similar to that, yet very simple. You can post your ideas, messages, links using only 140 characters in one message. Once you posted the message, it's sent to all your followers. You can follow any number of people and their twitter messages are appearing for you by chronological order. One important thing to notice is that twitter is built around a nice API which allows developers to create 3rd party applications. So, there are hundreds of applications for pretty much any platform(Windows, Linux, Phones, OSX, Browsers, etc). Once you install one of these applications, you don't have to keep checking the twitter site for updates, they are automatically appearing in your application giving you a notification (depending on the application though).

As I said earlier, twitter is not very popular among most of Sri Lankan internet users. However, there are some heavy Sri Lankan twitter users (including us), and we communicate through twitter quite often. One down side of the twitter communication is that it's very hard to track a conversation if there are lot of tweets. For example, let's assume I posted two twitter messages with review links to two products. Then, if someone sends me a reply stating his/her opinion on one of the product, that user is replying to the relevant post. However, in most of the twitter applications, the message is just appearing on your twitter stream. If you want to see the original tweet, you have to click on a link and go to the twitter website. Once the conversation gets longer, it's much harder - you have to keep clicking on links to see the whole conversation.

We were quite fed up with this and decided to create our own twitter application. The idea was very simple, nest any replies under the original message. In this way, you can easily see the whole conversation. In order to build the application, we had to choose a platform. Google Chrome browser was gaining lot of users at the time of development, and we were already quite familiar with web based technologies. So, we decided to build a google chrome extension, "Conwitter", as the first step.

The main feature of conwitter is the conversation styled interface. Other than this, we also added some nice features. One of these is, "Realtime Updates". Twitter has a limit on number of API calls per hour. Therefore any twitter has a time limit for checking new messages. For example, a twitter client can check for new messages every 3 minutes. However, while we are going through the twitter API documentation, they had an alpha stage streaming API. We combined this API into the normal API and built a realtime feature into conwitter. In this way, the users can see the tweets as soon as those are posted.

We also added many small UI improvements to conwitter such as "URL shortining","Username autocomplete", "Twitpic thumbnails".

Conwitter was started due to frustration and of course just for fun. However, we have received lot of positive feedback and feature requests over the months even though the product is still in alpha stage. The current version of the extension will be updated soon with most of the requested features.