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We are disappointed to announce that we have closed TweetPo.st to new users until further notice. This was a hard decision for us, but our top priority is delivering a high quality user experience for our current users and this is the only way we can do that at this point.

If you have already signed up for TweetPo.st, you will continue to be able to use it and we hope most of the issues that have cropped up in the last few weeks will soon be fixed. If you haven’t yet signed up for TweetPo.st, we really appreciate your interest and hope to open back up soon (please follow @tweet_post to be kept up-to-date on our progress).

The brief history of TweetPo.st has been a series of lessons in building products on other people’s platforms. The first version (called TweetFace until Facebook made us change it a couple weeks after release) was basically a public prototype built in a week about a year ago. It grew out of our desire to have ‘a smarter way to update Facebook from Twitter’ for our personal use and we only did it because it seemed so easy at the time. We didn’t even tell anyone about it other than our friends, but somehow people started to notice. We were happy that folks liked it and even happier that we didn’t have to worry about it while we worked on other things.

But then last fall, we began to get reports of strange behavior when new people tried to signup. When we finally had time to do some serious investigation, it turned out that Twitter had changed things in a way that made it impossible for TweetPo.st to add any more new users without us having to basically rewrite most of it, which we didn’t have the time to do then. It was wasn’t until this February that we were able to go back in and basically build a whole new TweetPo.st from the ground up using the latest APIs from Twitter and Facebook.

Based on our research and planning, we blocked out a couple weeks to implement and test the new version. But very soon into it, we realized that things weren’t going to be that easy — specifically, some of the Facebook APIs we had planned to use were broken and all of them were really slow and/or unreliable. In practical terms, this meant we had to do a whole bunch of extra work and testing to make things work correctly for our users. Unfortunately, the very issue with the Facebook APIs is their unpredictability and so at a certain point we had to make a best guess at how to deal with it and then see what happened.

The good news is that after seeing how the application has performed (or not) in the real world over the last couple months, we have a better sense of the pattern of the underlying issues. The bad news is that the long-term fixes for these issues are again going to require significantly more time than we can give right now. So, we have made some smaller fixes that should restore performance for existing users in the coming days and we have decided to close TweetPo.st to new users until we can make the long-term fixes to properly support them.

We can’t tell you how much we appreciate the patience and understanding of our current users. We recently added Tilly to our team to help with customer care across all our products starting with TweetPo.st, and she has been totally impressed with how cool you all have been. And to anyone finding this because they want to use TweetPo.st, we’re even more bummed than you that we can’t let you in yet (and we recommend Selective Tweets as a lightweight alternative in the meantime). We only want to build products people love to use and sometimes that requires us to go for more love from fewer people. We’re hard at work on a new version of awe.sm, which is going to be our main focus for the next few months. And hopefully, we’ll be able to do some more work on TweetPo.st soon after that. Thanks again for your support!

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* Update: We’ve suspended new signups on TweetPo.st until further notice. Full details here. *

I’m very happy to announce  we have begun private beta testing the new version of TweetPo.st. I’ll include the full back-story below, but I personally apologize for the lack of communication on TweetPo.st the last few months and for any frustration it may have caused. We’re really excited about the new version because, in addition to being able to take on new users again, we have added support for Facebook Pages, our top requested feature.

TweetPo.st is a smarter way to update Facebook from Twitter. Here are the key features of the new version:

• Post tweets as Facebook Status Updates
• Post links you tweet on your Facebook Wall (so your friends can watch videos and see pictures right in their News Feed)
• Ignore @replies
• Change @mentions to real names
• Only post the tweets you specify to Facebook (using either inclusive or exclusive filters)
• Track links posted to Facebook with awe.sm
• *NEW* Supports both Facebook Profiles and Pages
• *NEW* Manage multiple posting configurations from Twitter accounts to Facebook Profiles or Pages

While we’re eager to get as many people using the new version of TweetPo.st as soon as possible, we need to limit the number of users until we work out all the kinks. We don’t anticipate this private beta period lasting more than a couple of weeks, but feel free to email support [at] tweetpo.st if you’d like to help us test before then. Otherwise, please follow @tweet_post to be the first to know when it’s publicly available.

The Back-Story

About 4 months ago, we started seeing bug reports from users who were encountering errors signing up for TweetPo.st. It took some investigation, but we soon figured out that, due to the way we originally built the app (i.e. not using Twitter OAuth, which wasn’t available at the time), TweetPo.st had hit Twitter’s following/follower ratio limit. Without going into too much detail, this required us to completely re-architect TweetPo.st from the ground-up using Twitter’s new Streaming API.

Originally, we thought we’d get this all done in December. But, we’re a small team working on 3 products (awe.sm, TweetPo.st, and fbShare.me). So, sometimes things don’t happen as quickly as we’d like. However, we dropped the ball on communications in this case. We didn’t want to announce a revised schedule until we had one we felt we could stick to, and new things continued to come up that kept us from finishing TweetPo.st. So, instead we went radio silent, which was not the right thing to do.

We apologize for not handling the situation as well as we should. And we hope you find the new version of TweetPo.st worth the wait when we make it publicly available in the next few weeks.

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We’ve mentioned awe.sm a couple of times on this blog, and now it’s finally time to pull back the curtain and tell you guys what it’s all about. awe.sm is an open sharing analytics platform — a way to instrument, track, and analyze how content and attention flow through the social web. Since February, we’ve been working with a select group of application developers, tools partners, and content publishers to test and refine awe.sm and help us get it ready for today: the launch of our private beta! While we’re not quite ready to take all comers, we are now officially opening up the invites beyond the group that’s been so helpful these last 3 months. If you’ve already been in contact with us, thanks for your patience and we’ll be reaching out to you directly over the next few weeks with your invite. If you want to know how to get an invite, read on…

awe.sm for Publishers
Our mission here at the Snowball Factory is to help connect creators of interesting content with the people who love it. And we believe social media provides an incredibly powerful infrastructure to do that. awe.sm is the centerpiece of our efforts to make social media a more efficient, effective, and measurable marketing channel for content publishers. awe.sm integrates with the tools you already use to make the whole of your social media self-promotion efforts (e.g. pimping your latest blog post on Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, etc) greater than the sum of the parts by giving you a comprehensive view of the resulting traffic *right in Google Analytics*. awe.sm is currently supported in Twitterfeed, AddToAny, TweetFace (which we built too ), and our version of the Sociable WordPress Plugin. We’ve been working with TechCrunch as well as a number of smaller publishers during our alpha, and as of today we will be handing out invites to publishers who complete our survey. For more information on our publisher offering, please drop us a line to publishers [at] awe.sm.

awe.sm for Developers
In building awe.sm, we realized that sharing analytics is a pain point felt by a broader group than just publishers and we wanted to make our solution available to others building applications with sharing components. To that end, awe.sm was built from the APIs up and developers can recreate any of our features (or build new ones of their own) entirely in their own apps. We like to think of it as analytics infrastructure-as-a-service. And we’re proud to already be powering features of Zentact, Famery, SimplyBox, and KISSmetrics. We’re still limiting access to our API documentation at this point. But if you’re a developer who would like to check it out, please send a brief description of your application and how you would like to use awe.sm to developers [at] awe.sm.

awe.sm Partners
Each publisher’s approach to social media marketing is different, and we don’t believe there is (or should be) a one-size-fits-all solution. And while we will build some tools, like TweetFace, ourselves when we can’t find existing ones that do what we want, we’d much rather partner with folks who are totally focused on making a great tool to solve a particular publisher need. That’s why we’re very excited to announce awe.sm support in AddToAny, one of the most innovative share widgets out there, to go along with our previously announced Twittefeed integration. In addition to recommending partner tools to awe.sm publishers, we also plan to offer an affiliate model for partners who drive premium awe.sm signups. So if you’ve got a publisher tool that you’d like to integrate with awe.sm, please hit us up at partners [at] awe.sm.

Private-Label URL Shorteners (What you can get right now!)
One of the most notable features of awe.sm is that it can shorten long URLs, which we’ve been told is particularly useful for this thing called Twitter that everyone is talking about . It is such a notable feature that a bunch of people asked us if we could do it using domains other than http://awe.sm, which we can. In fact, we’re already powering URL shorteners for some of the above mentioned partners including TechCrunch (tcrn.ch), KISSmetrics (klck.me), Topspin (t.opsp.in), and AddToAny (a2a.me). So starting today, we’re officially offering *private-label URL shorteners running on your domain starting at just $99 per year*.

For $99/year, you get:

• a hassle-free hosted solution with no set-up costs
• 10k shortened URLs per month and no limit on redirections
• full clickstream stats and Google Analytics integration
• support in all awe.sm-enabled publisher tools
• 99% monthly uptime money-back guarantee

We also offer advanced features like the ability to build your own stats UI as well as dedicated servers and higher SLAs. You can get started now or ping us for more info at domains [at] awe.sm.