All about the new free features of Twitterfountain!

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Twitterfountain has received a major update today, this post will tell you all about the new and exciting free features!

The biggest change is the way you create a Fountain. We’ve freed the settings panel from the actual Fountain animation. This allows for a whole new range of options and more user-friendly ways of inputting your information.

Just one example: click ‘advanced’ when entering your Twitter keyword, and you’ll get a whole page of options to help you refine your twitter search.

Refining your Twitter search

We’ve simplified the way you build your animation. Just choose a a foreground and background style and you’re good to go!

animation types

Animation Types in the new HTML Settings panel

We’ve added two new animation types: a slide that shows three tweets simultaneously, sliding in from the left and happily floating around until it’s time to leave. In the background, you can now choose to display a stack of user avatar images. This stack will grow bigger and bigger, and will be a cool way to see who is visiting and tweeting at your event!

New animation types

Aside from these major changes, there have been a ton of small changes that you might not immediately notice.

The size of the tweets is adjusted to the size of your screen. The menu hides itself when you don’t use it.  Animations run more smoothly. And even more.

And last but not least: you can register for a free account. This account allows you to keep a handy list of all the Twitterfountains you’ve created!

All your fountains in one handy account page

A new Twitterfountain! Introducing accounts and moderation

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Since launching Twitterfountain in 2007, we were very fortunate to receive a lot of support from our users, and a lot of request for features. Uservoice has proven to be a great tool for streamlining this process, and helping us to see what you wanted from Twitterfountain.

A lot of you expressed the wish to have more control over the way your Twitterfountain looks and the tweets that are displayed. Effective today, we offer you the opportunity to create a fully customised Twitterfountain. You have access to different forms of moderation, you can specify background images and you can brand the Fountain with your logo and colors. As of today, you can fully customise and moderate your new  Twitterfountain for € 24,95 per Twitterfountain for a period of three months. And we will also keep offering the free version with basic controls!

Why three months?

Three months may seem like a short time, but these kind of customised Twitterfountains will typically be used at (corporate) events, to display the buzz around that event. Three months will give you more than enough time to play around with different settings and tweak the Fountain to your needs. Normally, you will have no use for the Twitterfountain after the event is over. Of course, if you need more time you can always prolong your Fountain with another three months.

Fine, so what types of moderation does the new Twitterfountain offer?

The default mode for Twitterfountain (and most other backchannels) is to show all tweets containing a certain hashtag or keyword. In most cases this is just fine, but sometimes you may need more control to make sure no inappropriate tweets appear on your screens. Twitterfountain offers the following options:

  1. Whitelisting users. Just show tweets from specified Twitter accounts. This is covered in the free version, but the number of accounts you can whitelist in this way is limited to somewhere between 20 and 25, due to limitations in the Twitter Search API. As a paid feature, we offer you a workaround to this restriction: create a Twitter account for your event, appoint a number of dedicated Twitter-reporters and follow them with the event-account, let Twitterfountain display the timeline of that account and voila.
  2. Blacklisting keywords. This blocks all tweets containing certain words you specify, be it offensive language or the brand names of your competitors. This feature is included in the free Twitterfountain, under ‘advanced search’. Again, the number of blackwords is limited by the Twitter Search API. The limit is variable, but seems at most times to be around 30. As a paid feature we offer the possibility for ‘live blacklisting’: you can add words during your event!
  3. Blacklisting users. Especially when your event is very popular or even trending, chances are that your hashtag will be hijacked by trolls and link baiters. As a paid option, you can blacklist (block) users both in advance and during the event.
  4. Manual moderation. The most restrictive (and labor intensive) form of moderation is to first read all the tweets containing your hashtag and than manually approve the ones you like. This can be done by creating a Twitter account for your event and instruct Twitterfountain to display the favorites of that account (paid feature). During the event you will need one or more moderators who monitor the Twitter stream and mark the approved tweets as favorites using any Twitter client.

Take a look at this video to see these new features explained and demonstrated:

Twitterfountain is free, but now also offers paid features

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Our basic Twitterfountain has been free since its first arrival and will remain so. Choose your Twitter keywords, add images, colors and animation, and get your own Twitterfountain as a shortlink and an embed code. Quick and easy, no registration needed.

All free.

The only thing we ask in return is that you help evangelize our product. Therefore, your free Twitterfountain will periodically show short messages like “This visualisation is brought to you by Twitterfountain, the original.” These messages are designed to be non-intrusive. We will not display third party adds. The frequency will be low.

We have every intention of maintaining the engaging experience that made Twitterfountain the most popular large screen backchannel to date. Also note: the messages will start to appear only after ten minutes, so when you embed your Twitterfountain on your website or blog, your visitors will probably never see them.

Paid features: more controls, more moderation

Based on what we’ve learned from you, our users, we are introducing new features that give you more control over both the contents and the looks of the Twitterfountain. We have written more about it here. To sum it up: this is what you get for €24,95:

  1. Whitelisting users.
  2. Blacklisting keywords.
  3. Blacklisting users.
  4. Manual moderation.
  5. The possibility to add logo and background images to brand your Twitterfountain.
  6. Three months of use.

“record’ a Twitterfountain and let it run after three months

Twitterfountain is often used in conventions and other events to show all tweets with the event’s hashtag. After the event has finished, the Twitterfountain gives a nice impression of what has happened and you will be tempted to embed it on your website. But because Twitter saves these tweets only for a couple of days, your Fountain will soon run dry …

Unless you buy our archive function, that will keep your Twitterfountain closed (no new tweets wil be added) but alive for another year, reliving all the excitement of your event.

We offer you the possibility to archive your Twitterfountain at a price of € 9,95 per year per Fountain.

Enjoy this video that runs you through a number of the free options:

 

(Dutch) We zoeken een snelle, goede developer

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We zoeken een (back end)-developer die bereid is mee te ondernemen in plaats van uurtje-factuurtje te doen. Voldoe je zelf niet aan het profiel, maar ken je in je omgeving wel geschikte mensen, wijs ze dan op deze mogelijkheid!

Twitterfountain groeit

Sinds het ontstaan van Twitterfountain in 2007 (!) heeft de gratis toepassing zich gestaag ontwikkeld en bekijken meer dan 100.000 mensen iedere maand een Twitterfountain online.

Het wordt tijd om gehoor te geven aan de verzoeken van gebruikers om bepaalde nieuwe functionaliteiten te introduceren. We denken bovendien dat het tijd is om ook een betaalde versie van Twitterfountain te gaan bieden, eentje waar de gebruiker meer mogelijkheden heeft tot moderatie van de inhoud.

Wat we nodig hebben:

Een goede, zelfstandige developer om voor Twitterfountain een nieuw backend te ontwikkelen waarmee:

  • user accounts beheerd kunnen worden
  • users kunnen betalen voor PRO-accounts (iDEAL, Paypal)
  • meerdere nieuwe features geimplementeerd worden
  • Daarnaast moet de developer ook
    • HTML template bouwen met formulieren (front-end werk
    • De bestaande methode voor het genereren van hashcode porteren (dit bestaat grotendeels al, hoeft alleen geintegreerd te worden met de nieuwe onderdelen)

De developer (m/v) is bij voorkeur in of in de buurt van Groningen gevestigd.

Taal/Techniek

Coding kan wat ons betreft in Django, Ruby on Rails of vergelijkbaar. Wat er aan backend aanwezig is, is op basis van PHP en MySQL. Voor de goede orde: Twitterfountain zelf is een Flash-based applicatie.

Twitterfountain krijgt superduper hosting aangeboden door Internet Valley, je zult werken met hun Debian-install, en hun support (die uitstekend is).

Timing

Door het onverwacht afhaken van de ontwikkelaar, die ons de afgelopen twee jaar ondersteunde op het gebied van PHP en MySQL, komt onze planning in gevaar. Eigenlijk zouden we deze klus voor het einde van september geklaard willen hebben.

Vergoeding

Twitterfountain is nu een gratis product. Er is dus geen geld om het werk nu al te betalen. Maar we verwachten dat de PRO-versie zeker een geldstroom op gang gaat brengen. Het aanbod is derhalve volledig in overeenstemming met de doelstellingen van de Tijdbank:

  • we hadden deze activiteiten begroot op 24 uur,
  • we betalen je je uren uit, zodra er geld binnenkomt vanuit de TF PRO en net zolang tot we de uren netjes vergoed hebben,
  • om het de moeite waard te maken, beloven we je 125% te betalen, dus geen uren voor €65/uur, maar €81,25/uur, excl BTW.

Interesse?

Neem dan contact op met Lykle (lykle@deondernemers.nl, @lykle, 06-53766964).