Original: I’d like to apologize to our ReStream users who used our service to stay informed on their favorite topics. Twitter has suspended our account, @ReStreamAlerts, which we used to notify you of new content that matched your interests. We didn’t receive a notification from Twitter before our account was banned and have not received a response since appealing the suspension on Tuesday. Last time we had an account banned, it took several weeks before we received a response saying that it was banned in error.

What’s most frustrating about this ban is that we used @ReStreamAlerts for 7 months without any issues. I suspect that Twitter has changed their algorithm for auto-banning. I created a backup account called @ReStreamAlert to use while I waited for our old account to be reinstated. Just hours after setting up this backup account, it too was suspended without notification.

As a developer I’m tired of these antics. I’m tired of the ReStream login being inaccessible for several hours at a time because Twitter is unable to keep up with their traffic. If you see a fail whale it usually mean that you can’t log into 3rd party Twitter apps. Now a key piece of our application has been shut down without notification and what’s sure to be several weeks without an explanation from Twitter. I’ll continue to support ReStream as it’s a passion of mine but I won’t be building any more dedicated Twitter applications. There’s too much risk, the platform is too unreliable, and the banning of accounts without notification is ridiculous. It’s too bad because it’s a fantastic service.

The infant stages of the Right Time Web are here. Look at FourSquare, Gowalla, and Facebook. They are all building and leveraging the Right Time Web by customizing experiences based on our interests. For your web application to leverage the Right Time Web you need to be aware of the 6 pillars that encompass it. They are:

Personal Information

How old are you? What gender and race are you? Who your friends are?

Location / Time

Where are you now? What time of day is it?

Interests

What are your hobbies? What do you like to do?

Schedule

Where are you going? How much free time do you have?

Status

What are you doing right now? What do you need right now?

Wish Lists

What do you wish you owned? What do you want to learn or do?

What Makes a Web Application “Right Time”?

Right Time Web applications need to integrate 2 or more of these pillars. One is not enough.

For example, your interests can be combined with upcoming events and your schedule to notify you that on your upcoming vacation there’s a concert that you would enjoy attending.

Or, your wish list could be combined with your location to let you know the camera your want is on sale at the store you’re in.

There are hundreds of examples. What’s important is the accuracy of the information. Right Time web apps don’t spam. The noise is filtered out leaving you with just the information that you need at that point in time.

Add Twitter Favorites

1. Log into ReStream
2. Go to your recommended reading page (click on your name in the top navigation)
3. Click on “Favorite Tweets” in the right navigation

This will import your last 500 tweets into ReStream – assuming you have that many. Once complete, allow a few minutes, your Twitter favorites will be used to improve our content recommendations to you.

One of the most overlooked features of Twitter is Twitter favorites. You can favorite any post in Twitter that you like or you want to reference at a later date. The problem with Twitter favorites is the more you use them, the harder it is to reference them later. You can only scroll through them in a descending date order.

To fix this, I’ve added sort-by-tag and sort-by-author to the Twitter favorites page in ReStream. This works well for helping you find your favorites but it doesn’t help the people you want to share them with which is why I’ve added a new option.

When you go to your Twitter favorites in ReStream, there’s a link called “share my favorites”. Clicking on this link will take you to a page that you can share with anyone. Now you’ve given everyone the opportunity to view and filter your favorites the same way you can.

Example: Here’s an example using my Twitter favorites.

Using “Share My Favorites”

If you have a ReStream account, you will need to import your favorites if you haven’t already done so. You can do this by logging in, clicking on your name at the top of the page, then selecting “Favorite Tweets” from the right navigation. Your favorites will start importing right away. If this is your first time importing favorites, it could take several minutes. After the first import, the page will load much faster. Once complete, you’ll see the “share my favorites” link that you can send to your friends.

If you don’t have a ReStream account, all you need to do is login using your Twitter account. The sign-in process will walk you through the steps necessary to create your account including importing your favorites. Once your finished, click on the “Favorite Tweets” link in the right navigation and you’ll see a complete list of your favorites. Here you’ll find the “share my favorites” link you can use to send to your friends or add to your web site.

The downside to Twitter favorites is that you can only look through them in the order that you saved them, one page at a time. This makes all that great content you favorited very difficult to reference. To fix this, I’ve added some new filtering features on ReStream.me.

Filtering Twitter Favorites

Yesterday, I added two new filters to Twitter favorites: filter by tag and filter by author. Once you import your favorites, you can select any of your top 15 tags or top 10 authors to find related favorites. You can also view any page of favorites so jumping to any favorite is much easier.

To get started, log into ReStream.me using Twitter. Import your favorites (step 3 in the sign up process) and go to your recommendations page. Once there, click on “favorite tweets” in the navigation to go to your Twitter favorites. Happy filtering!

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Last week Twitter crossed the 9 billion tweet mark. Incredible considering Twitter crossed the 5 billion mark just 4 months ago. Averaging over 300 million tweets per week means that Twitter will hit the 10 billion mark at the beginning of March.

Other statistics from the past week:

• Tweets per week increased of 5% over previous week
• 47,455,890 Tweets per Day
• 1,977,329 Tweets per Hour
• 32,955 Tweets per Minute
• 549 Tweets per Second

Right now, it takes just over 3 weeks to add 1 billion tweets. Twitter didn’t pass the 1 billion tweet mark until November of 2008. It took them another year to add another 4 billion tweets. At the current pace, they’ll easily add another 12+ billion this year.

Clearly, Twitter is still a very popular service and it is continuing to grow. Over the next couple of weeks we’ll see if they can continue to keep this momentum or if services such as Google Buzz will start to eat away at it’s popularity.

Today, we launched a new directory service to help Twitter users connect on Google Buzz. You can search the directory for your favorite Twitter users and find their Google Buzz IDs. Then, instead trying to guess who the correct people are to follow, simply search using the Google ID to find the person you want to connect with. Be sure to add your name so your followers can find you too.

Learn More: Twitter to Google Buzz Directory Service