TweetLens is dead. Long live TweetLens.

I’ve been working on a project called TweetLens for about four months. After a few months of programming, trying out different ideas and having hopes to turn it into a start up of some sort it’s time to face reality. That reality is that I want to build tech. companies that enrich people’s lives and makes me money. I believe that TweetLens accomplishes the first but will never accomplish the second.

So it was a bitter sweet decision to stop working on TweetLens as a possible business start up. After some thought I decided the best thing is to  open source it under the MIT license. I don’t want to see the project die and there is a lot of great work (IMHO) that went into it. Letting others have a go at it or incorporate it into their tools would be a great way to keep the value from fading.

The bitter part about the decision is having to admit that it would fail as a viable business. I still believe that most of the tools out there still suck and there is an opportunity for a real kick ass twitter web client. What I don’t regret is the time spent building it because the journey itself was very rewarding.

That is the sweet part. Building TweetLens I learned more about JavaScript than I could ever imagine. Before TweetLens I thought of JavaScript as just a tool for fancy animations and AJAX. Now I realize how amazing a language it is for delivering a high level of application usability within the browser.

Combined with jQuery’s awesome event handling I was learned about event driven programming (EDP). This lead me down a path into SOA (service-oriented architecture) and a new world of possibilities opened up to me. I love thinking about how technology can be applied to enrich people’s lives.

So while the project itself was a failure in its original purpose the new experience, skills and knowledge gained have a lot of value. Either way I don’t regret where working on TweetLens has taken me.

So this is the plan for the new open TweetLens.

1. Clean up the source code and throw it up on GitHub. I just opened up an account, now I gotta figure out how to use. I love learning new things.
2. Tweak tweetlens.com to be the project’s web and demo site. There is a lot of cool functionality that I built into TweetLens and it deserves some showcasing.
3. Continue tweaking the code. There’s some nifty new features and enhancements that would make it a bit more usable. I’ve been thinking of re-architecting the event model, making leveraging $(document) more as the communication channel, almost completely eliminating the call stack… well you know geek out! :)

So a new future for TweetLens and I’m going to focus more on my next projects. I got a few great ones in the hopper. And this time co-founders!

Tagged as: git, open source, tweetlens