Sunday, July 26th, 2009 marks an important milestone in the development and growth of TweetLater.com.

At around 2:00 PM EST our number of users went past the 100,000 mark.

Many thanks to all our wonderful users who have made this possible.

It is our honor and privilege that you have chosen us to improve your productivity on Twitter.

Sunday, July 5th, 2009: A lot of people with legitimate Twitter accounts are currently suffering from having their accounts suspended (late Sunday afternoon).

It is not TweetLater’s doing or fault. So, please do not submit a TweetLater support request about it.

We just heard back from Twitter via email, and they said : “Spamcloud hit. We’re working on restoring accounts.”

We just need to be patient. The suspended accounts will be restored.

Update: We have no idea exactly what a “spam cloud” means. It is probably Twitter staff lingo for a massive spam attack.

Update: We have seen during previous spam attacks that Twitter tends to shoot first and ask questions later and indiscriminately lay down carpet bombing when their system comes under a spam attack. A lot of innocent-bystander accounts get massacred in the process, which they then have to restore afterwards. This is most likely what has happened again.

Update: We have no idea how long it will take Twitter to restore the wrongly suspended accounts. We do not have insight into that information.

Update: Twitter has now posted an update about the suspensions on their status blog.

Earlier today, we accidentally suspended a number of accounts.

We regret the human error that led to these mistaken suspensions and we are working to restore the affected accounts—we expect this to be completed in the next several hours.

One additional note: some the accounts suspended were using the third-party site Tweetlater. However, Tweetlater is not to blame for these suspensions nor is it in violation of our Terms.

Update: It appears that the issue has now been resolved and most suspended accounts have been restored. If your account is still suspended, please submit a support request at http://help.twitter.com and ask them to look at your account.

Post-Mortem by Dewald Pretorius, Owner of TweetLater.com

It is a real pity, but probably unavoidable, that some people have a tendency to jump to premature conclusions. A lot of folks almost immediately blamed TweetLater for the suspensions, and some even canceled their TweetLater accounts.

The reason why many TweetLater users were affected was very simple. We service a very large number of Twitter accounts. At time of writing that number exceeded 100,000 Twitter accounts. If Twitter makes a mistake that affects a large number of accounts, then naturally a large number of TweetLater users will be affected by the mistake.

I work very hard to maintain an excellent working relationship with Alex Payne, Matt Sanford, and Doug Williams of the Twitter API team, and with Del Harvey of the Twitter Spam team. They are always very responsive, professional, and helpful whenever I approach them.

And, I work equally hard to ensure, with the help and advice of the Twitter folks mentioned above, that TweetLater features always remain within the Twitter Terms and never does anything that Twitter frowns upon. TweetLater is my bread and butter, the thing that pays my mortgage. Hence, being a good neighbor of Twitter is absolutely essential, no, it is absolutely non-negotiable to me. I regularly turn down feature requests and offers of large additional payments for some new features, which I know will not sit well with Twitter and potentially jeopardize my service’s standing with Twitter.

The lesson from this is as follows: Things are often much simpler and far more benign than what some people want to believe. Perhaps it’s because conspiracy theories are more interesting, or more sensational, that people want to believe them rather than just the simple mundane truth. I don’t know.

It’s just very frustrating to watch your service, your passion, come under attack when you have done nothing wrong.

Nevertheless, there is also an upside to this matter, and I will conclude with it and close this post on a positive note.

This issue has created an enormous amount of free publicity for TweetLater, which makes me very happy.

Twitter implemented an API change on July 1st, 2009 so that all tweets originating via the API now have “from API” in the source display area of the Twitter timelines.

Previously the source area said “from web” when the originating application did not supply a source parameter when it publishes the tweet.

For the time being, TweetLater will continue to not provide a source parameter, which means your scheduled tweets will all have “from API” in the source display area.

We may evaluate this matter at a later date and decide if we should send a source parameter so that the tweets have “from TweetLater” in the source area.

Your feedback in the comments will be appreciated.

Update: Just want to clarify the following:

1. This was a change that Twitter unilaterally implemented on their side.
2. We cannot manipulate or change the source display. There are only two choices namely “from API” or “from TweetLater”. If we continue to not supply a source parameter, the tweets will continue to say “from API”.
3. We cannot go back to “from web” because Twitter does not allow that. From July 1 the only tweets that say “from web” are those that were manually entered in the web interface of Twitter.com.
4. It is not only TweetLater that is affected by this. The tweets from all third-party applications that don’t supply a source parameter now say “from API”.
5. Chances are that we will leave it as is, i.e., as saying “from API” for TweetLater. Our service is fortunately large enough, popular enough, and receive sufficient word-of-mouth exposure that we have no need to use the source display as an advertisement for TweetLater.

Update: This comment from Ryan deserves highlighting here in the post body: “If you are providing your followers with something valuable they won’t care where the tweets are coming from.” So true, Ryan! When we change over to the OAuth authentication method of Twitter, we may not have a choice anymore in terms of the source label. Our understanding is that when an application uses OAuth, all tweets from that application are automatically labeled with the name of that application. We will be changing over to OAuth as soon as Twitter takes their OAuth authentication out of beta testing. To be clear, changing to OAuth is not optional for a Twitter application. Twitter is going to deprecate the username/password authentication method.

Nobody needs to tell you that direct message SPAM is ever increasing on Twitter. Just try and wade through your DM inbox on some days.

We have just launched our brand-new integrated Direct Message Manager, where you can manage the DMs of all your Twitter accounts on one single page, in one integrated view.

From that page you can DM the senders, unfollow or block them, forward the DM to someone else, and more.

But even more powerful are the SPAM rules that you can define. The system will apply your rules every time you open or refresh your Direct Message Manager, and get rid of any unwanted DMs.

You can tell the system to just delete a DM when you mark it as SPAM, or delete it and unfollow the person, or delete it and block the person, etc.

Furthermore, you can also enter keyphrases that we must monitor. If someone sends you a DM that contains one of those keyphrases, we will automatically apply your SPAM rules to that DM.

In addition, you can also tell the system to look at what other TweetLater users think of person who sent you a DM. If someone else has already marked it as SPAM, you can tell us to automatically mark it as SPAM on all your Twitter accounts as well.

The Direct Message Manager is available to TweetLater Professional users (and those on the free trial of TweetLater Professional).

In keeping with our commitment, this powerful new feature comes at no additional charge.

You can access the Direct Message Manager by logging in to your TweetLater account, clicking the DMs menu tab, and then the DM Manager sub-menu tab.

TweetLater.com will be unavailable on Saturday May 30, 2009 between 8:00 AM EST and 11:00 AM EST.

During that time no automation will take place, and scheduled tweets and DMs will not be published.

When the site is available again, scheduled tweets and DMs that should have been published during the maintenance window will be published as soon as possible. Follower processing will then also resume where it stopped at the start of the window.

If you have any time-critical tweets or DMs, please modify their scheduled times now so that the times fall outside the maintenance window.

This blog and the support ticket system will remain online during the maintenance window.

Update:

The maintenance has been completed.

If you are still seeing the “down for maintenance page” with the message about propagation of the new IP address, you may want to consider switching over to use the DNS servers at OpenDNS.com on your computer.

In the fight against spam over the weekend, something horrible went wrong with new code in the tweet posting script. In some cases it duplicated scheduled recurring tweets. Go figure. Fix one thing and break another.

All recurring tweets that appear to be duplicates have been placed in the red error condition for you to review.

You can either bulk delete them with the Tweets, Delete function in the top menus, or, if it is a valid recurring tweet, you can simply edit and reschedule it.

There should be one non-red recurring (and still active) tweet, of which all the red ones are duplicates.

You may also find that some of your Ping.fm recurring tweets have been advanced several recurs into the future. Unfortunately we cannot fix that by means of a script. We ask that you edit those recurring tweets and reset the scheduled date and time to what it is supposed to be.

Apologies for the inconvenience.

As you probably know, the new follower vetting feature of TweetLater is very popular and very powerful in helping you follow only those folks you want to follow and yet enjoy the time-saving benefits of automation at the same time.

If you haven’t tried it yet, please do so. Follower vetting interrupts the auto-follow process for 72 hours and gives you the opportunity to decide whether you want to follow, ignore, or block a new follower.

Up to now you’ve been able to define your rules, which pre-selected the decisions for you so that you could quickly scan the list and record the decisions. But, you had no insight into how other people decided over the same followers. Did they approve the person, ignore the person, or block the person? You didn’t know.

We have now added aggregate (and anonymous) information to each new follower that will tell you what percentage of people approved the person, what percentage ignored the person, and what percentage blocked the person.

We hope this helps you keeping your Friends list in high quality, and getting rid of Twitter spammers.

To activate follower vetting on your Twitter account, login to TweetLater, click the Accounts menu tab and then the List Accounts sub-menu tab. Then click the Edit link of your Twitter account.

Select the vet new followers option. Important: You must also select either the auto-follow option or the welcome note option (or both), for follower vetting to work. If you don’t select either of those options, then there will never be anything to vet.

We’ve just switched on this feature on May 18, 2009. Over the coming weeks and months you will see more and more followers with percentages greater than zero, as we accumulate everyone’s decisions.

As part of this enhancement, and since we now keep a history of your decisions, you will now also never see the same follower more than once in your vetting list. That will deal very sweetly with the people who play the follow, unfollow, follow, unfollow game.

We are very pleased to announce that TweetLater now has an Application Programming Interface (API), which can be used by other developers to integrate their applications with TweetLater.

Twitter’s API is what enables you to use applications such as TweetDeck, Seesmic Desktop, Digsby, etc.

With TweetLater’s API those developers can now expand the functions of their applications and enable you to use TweetLater in those applications.

The API enables you to add, edit, and delete scheduled tweets. TweetLater Professional users can manipulate recurring tweets as well as scheduled @replies and DMs. More features will be added in the future. We just wanted to “get the API out the door” with this initial set of functions and not get bogged down in “enhancement paralysis”.

There is no additional charge for using the API.

The detail specs of the API are available at:

http://www.tweetlaterapi.com

Change is good, it is often said, and we hope this change will be good from your perspective.

Up to now you could delegate the management of your Twitter account to another TweetLater Professional user.

That has now changed.

You can now delegate your Twitter account management to both TweetLater Free and TweetLater Professional users.

What they can do on your account is determined by the TweetLater features they have access to in their accounts.

If you need someone to simply enter and edit scheduled tweets for you, then all they need is a TweetLater Free account.

If you want them to schedule recurring tweets, use TweetCockpit, etc., then they would need a TweetLater Professional account.

You can delegate your account to as many TweetLater users as you want.

Note: You still need a TweetLater Professional account to be able to do the delegation.

There is an issue with the TweetLater server. We’re investigating.

Further updates will follow.

Update April 27, 8:02 am — The server ran out of memory during the night. Everything is back online again.