(image from: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/)

MeshTop and Twittertwit_book_300x200

Twitter has always been in the back of our minds during the development of MEshTop. We had integrated Twitter in MeshTop before it became a fashion phrase in the news and in politicians’ words. No later than the summer of 2008, we had already built a demo version of MeshTop with the Twitter REST services. MeshTop continues to evolve with each new release of Twitter’s services, which are pretty resource intensive, to continually catch the changes using Twitter’s REST. Sometimes we have to abandon our implemented ideas, but fortunately, more often than not, we are watching MeshTop users enjoying more and more powerful support for Twitter’s services.

“What are you doing?”

As seen in our 1.0 release, MeshTop introduces the “What are you doing?” gadget to the sidebar view, which supports the feature of updating the status of both your Twitter and Facebook accounts.  Updating to Twitter can be performed both by clicking on the ‘Reply’, ‘Direct Message’, or ‘Retweet’ buttons in menus, or you can tell MeshTop what your response method by typing directly in the box, and MeshTop will identify the Twitter gestures, “@”, “D” and “RT”.

MeshTop also offers interfaces for users sharing links and images through the use of shortened URLs. Shortened URLs are highly praised by some bloggers for avoiding long encoded links (meaningless for most users unversed in CS). Currently you can select between the TinyURL and Bit.ly service providers in ‘Options’ menu, which are both popular with Twitter users. MeshTop also allows you to share images through the TwitPic API. After clicking on’ Share an Image’ on TwitPic, you are able to select an image in your computer file browser to send to TwitPic, which will return the shared image location expressed in a shortened URL. MeshTop also allows users to post these shortened links for webpages and images on their status updates on Facebook as well.

Follow us on Twitter @hellomeshtop
Email us at: hello@meshtop.com