SecretTweet - Post your secrets to Twitter anonymously.

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   The people from eBay/PayPal teamed up with Miller/Coors (yeah, the beer people) to donate $0.01 for every tweet, facebook update, and blogpost with the hashtag #beatcancer. The only catch is that it had to be made within a 24 hour period starting Friday, October 16th at 9 am (PDT) and lasting until Saturday, October 17th at 9am (PDT). You can read more on the campaign at http://beatcancereverywhere.com.

         Once I heard about this idea, I immediately thought that one penny wasn’t enough. So I said I would personally double that amount if the tweet contained both “@SecretTweet” and “#beatcancer”. After a few hours and a couple thousand tweets with “@SecretTweet #beatcancer”, I received a direct message from an anonymous user telling me he/she would also match that amount. Once I let everyone know that the amount was now tripled, the tweets literally came pouring in. Thousands upon thousands of tweets started flooding the timeline. Although hard on my wallet, this was a great sight to see!

         So just how many tweets did @SecretTweet users generate by themselves? A little over 7,250. I’m going to go ahead and round my donation up to an even $100. Add to that the anonymous donor’s match of $72.50 and ebay/miller’s donation of $72.50, that’s $245 towards beating cancer. My donation will go to Stand Up To Cancer and will be made as soon as I connect with the anonymous donor again.

   If you’re thinking that $245 isn’t that much, consider that this amount was raised from what started as a single tweet from a single twitter account. Out of the millions of twitter users, you guys, the @SecretTweet followers, counted for 3.5% of the 208,000 #beatcancer tweets. That’s quite an accomplishment and you guys should be proud!

If you would like to donate to Stand Up to Cancer, click here.

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You can now vote either thumbs up or thumbs down on the comments.

Just look for these buttons:

Get started! >> http://secrettweet.com

Another new feature coming soon is the ability to hide/remove retweets from the comments.

Is there something you’d like to see added to secrettweet? Send an email to community@secrettweet.com or comment on this entry :)

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I’m blowing the dust off the blog. There hasn’t been a post containing an actual update or news in over FOUR months. Insane, I know. The good news is that there have actually been updates, I just didn’t have the will to write about them haha. So here’s what’s up:

– You can submit your secret straight from you phone! I’ve actually had the feature ready for nearly a year and have been neglecting to make it public. So far, the response has been pretty good. Click here for details.

– See what the most popular tweets are for the current day. The Top 8 are listed at the top of every page. It still baffles me why some receive as many views as they do.

– Artistic? Good news! You can attach artwork (even something as simple are your secret in writing) to your secrettweet submission. This feature is VERY new (released only a day or two ago). I’m excited to see the response. To add your artwork, go about submitting your secret as usual. You’ll notice there’s now a neat little add artwork button. Make use of it :)

– SecretTweet’s on Facebook. If you want to become a fan of SecretTweet on Facebook, go here (click). I might feel the need to give away some free stuff to random Facebook fans one day…who knows? ;)

– The moderators got a new view. It’s much cleaner and runs MUCH more efficiently. Want to help moderate? Go to http://secrettweet.com/admin/signup.php. There are still a few bugs left to be worked out, but the core functions very nicely.

– On a geek note, the core code/functions of SecretTweet.com received a much needed makeover. As time goes by, new features are added, features are removed, features are improved upon, Twitter’s API changes — several things happen to the code. I recently took nearly three weeks off from publishing secrets to rework the core of the site and improve what needed to be improved. I have one major feature that will increase the speed of the site three fold (yes, 3x faster than what it runs at now). I’m working on removing a few kinks in the code before making it public. I expect to have this ready in another month or so. Once it’s released, the site should load almost instantaneously and the load on the database will be cut significantly.

– Another feature that’s in the works was actually suggested by one of you guys — daily email summaries of tweets. I understand that even though tweets are released from @SecretTweet once an hour and only during specific hours of the day, @SecretTweet can still flood your twitter stream. You’ll soon be able to subscribe to receive a daily email of tweets and comment summaries. Should be handy for those of you that like a clean twitter feed.

– And SecretTweet is still broke. I’m still spending my time working on it LOL. Support the site and me by visiting often and exploring what the advertisers have to offer. If you enjoy the site, buy me a beer.

Have a feature you’d like to see added? Having problems with the site? Have hate mail? Send it all to community@secrettweet.com.

Thanks for being active in SecretTweet, guys. I hope you’ve enjoyed using the site as much as I’ve enjoyed building it ;)

Regards,
Kevin S.
@mozunk

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Just a heads up to those who keep up with the blog: there’s a scheduled community chat this Thursday at 10pm eastern. The URL will be http://SecretTweet.com/chat.php. Join everyone for some casual conversation.

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**note: You might have noticed a large delay between the time a tweet is submitted to SecretTweet.com and the time it is published to @SecretTweet or @SecretTweet3. I’ve had some personal problems (link) this month that have taken a large portion of my time and desire to work. The site should pickup in the coming weeks and resume to its previous status (meaning new features, faster approval time, etc — just like before). Thanks for understanding.
**

Hi guys :)
If you haven’t noticed the pattern, I usually push out major updates on a monthly basis. So, since June is right up on us, it’s time to start working on new stuff. If that’s not awesome enough, you guys get to choose what it is. The highly requested mobile posting has been ready for nearly six months, I just haven’t had the time to turn it on. That will be done very soon. Here are some other ideas I’ve been tossing around:
– Receive comments/replies to a specific tweet via email.
– An ad free option (this used to exist but was later removed. I’m probably going to bring it back).
– Profiles for submitters (age and gender, perhaps location).
– Your idea, suggestion, comment here! Tell me what you want to see changed, added, removed, done, or tried.

Comment on this post or send a direct message to @secrettweet (if you send an @reply, I probably will not see it, there are just too many to read them all — direct messages, please :)).

Hope you guys are enjoying the start of the summer! Personally, I can’t wait for vacation time!

Regards,
– Kevin (@mozunk)
The SecretTweet Guy ;)

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Hi there!

A note on the new design
As promised a few weeks ago, a new design has been released. Yeah, there are a few bugs that have yet to be worked out and I’m working as fast as possible to get those fixed (I have a life outside of SecretTweet, ya know LOL). Regardless, if you notice a bug or anything that you think is wrong, leave a comment on this post with a brief description of what’s wrong — I can’t fix things unless I’m aware of the problem.

So what’s new?

• – The site should meet most of Section 509 guideliens (http://www.section508.gov/) that would prevent anyone from reading the site. This is something I’m striving to implement site-wide. If you’re disabled and you or your software have a problem reading SecretTweet, send an email to community@secrettweet.com. I’ll fix whatever is wrong.
• – The old CAPTCHA has been trashed and a new one using the reCAPTCHA service is currently in use. It’s a tad bit harder to read but I have no problem using it. No more CAPTCHA errors! (Should’ve done this a long time ago)
• – The tagging system that everyone seemed to ignore (for some reason) has been ditched and a new, simple search has been added to the bottom right of the site. As with the design itself, it’s new, but I don’t think there are any bugs that will prevent it from functioning perfectly. If the search becomes a popular tool, I’ll beef it up and add a few bells and whistles.

Changes regarding how tweets are handled
A change to how secrets are handled is starting Saturday, May 9. The unabridged section and @SecretTweet3 will be publishing a lot fewer tweets while the moderated version (the version you see on SecretTweet.com and @SecretTweet) will be publishing a lot more tweets. I’m considering ditching the unabridged section and @SecretTweet3 all together and just publishing the most popular tweets to @SecretTweet. What do you guys think?

SecretTweet on Facebook and MySpace
I’ve refrained from putting SecretTweet on platforms other than Twitter. I recently created groups on Facebook and MySpace, though. You can join the Facebook group here and you can join the MySpace group here.

I welcome your opinion on the new changes and I also welcome any ideas to improve SecreTweet that you may have. You can comment on this post, JOIN THE FORUM ;), or email community@secrettweet.com.

Best Regards,
@mozunk
Kevin Smith

PS: Happy Mother’s Day to you moms out there :) :)

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A new look/design will be coming soon. A few new features will appear, too. Expect things to change in about a week and a half (maybe two).
As far as what new features are coming: all pages are being rewritten to update them and to streamline the content, you’ll be able to search through all the tweets, the tagging system has been rewritten, and a few other minor things that will make the experience on the site overall easier to navigate.

Here’s a very rough preview of what the new design might look like:
http://hellokevin.com/st-design.jpg – Click!

Leave your feedback in the comments or on the new forum (http://secrettweet.com/forum)!

A new look has already popped up on @SecretTweet. Changes are coming!

Regards,
@mozunk
ST Admin Guy

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I accidentally overlooked my calendar marking that read “ST 1 YR” — oops.

So what has happened in the first year? A lot.
– Within the first week, submissions went from 1 per day to one per hour (now we average 11 submissions per hour — *THIS* is why all tweets are not published to @secrettweet and are sometimes published to @secrettweet3 instead).
– We (are about to) reach 20,000 followers (that’s averaging 55 STAYING, new followers per day!)
– 34, 087 people have released their secrets for us to read. Thank you.
– 17,142 replies have been made (within the past six or so months — replies are a fairly new, and controversial, addition to the site).
– I launched a blog to help explain what is going on behind the scenes and to encourage more interaction with you guys (http://secrettweet.com/updates)
– We received mentions by LA Times, NY Times, El Pias, Fox News, hundreds of other new outlets, and thousands of other websites and blogs (thanks!)
– I opened up the moderation process to the public. Over 670 moderators have registered, about half of them are active on a weekly basis. Without you guys, I couldn’t keep up with the content and the site would ultimately fail.
– And, finally, a forum was launched on April 1 (One day before the one year anniversary). Since the launch three days ago, the forum has averaged: 14 new users per day, 85 new posts per day, 9 new topics per day, and 12,658 page views. I encourage you to join and take part in the on-going conversations or start your own! Register here http://secrettweet.com/forum/index.php?action=register

I just want to say thank you to everyone who has felt comfortable enough to share their secret with everyone else. Thank you for tweeting, blogging, writing, and talking about SecretTweet. Thanks for replying with supportive and encouraging comments (and thank you for flagging those that aren’t). Thanks for reading this, for being as enthusiastic about your experience on the website as I am. Hopefully I will be writing another post like this on April 2, 2010, and many years after that.

Best Regards,
Kevin Smith
@mozunk
@SecretTweet Guy

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I understand that, for one reason or another, some users don’t want to have others comment on their SecretTweet submissions. So now, when you submit a secret, you can disable comments by checking the box right above the submit button. When you do this, users will see “The submitter of this SecretTweet indicated that he/she doesn’t want comments/replies to be shown for this specific SecretTweet.” instead of the comment form. Also, public replies will not be shown.

Also be sure to keep sending me feedback for features you want to see or problems you have stumbled across. It’s much appreciated! :)

Regards,
@mozunk
Kevin Smith
SecretTweet Guy

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I’ve adjusted the way to have your public replies to @SecretTweet be indexed. There’s no more need for the tilde (~).

New format is just “@secrettweet number reply”.

Send a tweet with the following format:
“@secrettweet ****** your reply here.”
Reply to @secrettweet with the tweet number followed by your reply. The tweet number is published at the beginning of EVERY tweet (starting 4/15/08).
If you follow this format correctly, your tweet will show up in the replies for the corresponding tweet (it may take up to 15 minutes to be picked up by the SecretTweet bot, though).

Here’s an example of the proper way. If you look at Secret 21801, you’ll notice the reply shows there. You can also reply anonymously by clicking the “View Comments” link under each tweet.

——-
For those of you who are in the habit of using the old format, don’t worry, I’ll continue to support the indexing of those replies as well. This newer format just save one character and it’s less confusing.

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