What is fast?
We released Twitbear into wild this week. Twitbear is a hobby project done by me, Helene Auramo (Zipipop) and Kai Lemmetty (Floobs). Twitbear enables discussion on Twitter.
Feedback has been amazing and it has spawned a number of really interesting discussions. I will discuss those in separate posts (such as design decisions which might have caused some discussion). Although you should understand that Twitbear is still in closed beta and should be considered more as a proof-of-concept than a ready service (for now).
I’ve been asked multiple times how much time it took to build it. There is no definite answer. I would guess it all started when we started to get frustrated in Jaiku and tried using Twitter. Decision to build Twitbear was done probably a bit over month ago. After that there was a lot of planning done. We had different kind of models how to do everything, but ended up selecting the current one. Our aim was just to enable discussions on top of Twitter. Nothing more.
After that Helene started working on the design (first the bear, then the service ;D). Once the design was roughly ready, we started working on the technical solution which we built on Ruby on Rails. Building the layout from PSD-files probably took 4 hours and the actual development around 3-4 days total. It doesn’t seem much, but we had a really clear plan what to do. Plan which wouldn’t be possible without months of hesitation whether to use Jaiku or Twitter, excellent team, great design work, tossing around model how we could do things..
We were not in hurry and that could be one reason why we were so “fast”. When there is no pressure, you have time to think what is important.
What makes you fast?
