QT QuTee – a Quicker way to Tweet

Just around an hour ago I launched my first Twitter application: QT QuTee. QT or QuTee or Quick Tweet – whatever you may prefer to call it. It enables you to tweet quickly without opening Twitter. And most importantly, you can’t do anything except that. This the beauty of QuTee. I wanted it to be quick, small and simple. What makes me to build this app? Is this app going to help you in any manner. Or is it just a waste of my time and money? The story follows…

Sometimes (actually many times) I want to tweet something; it may be some random thoughts, ideas, junks etc. I want to tweet those, so that they will be posted as my Facebook updates, on my Buzz, on identi.ca etc. I don’t want to see my twitter time line or whether someone has mentioned me or messages (now Twitter calls direct messages (DM) as messages). Neither I want to follow someone nor I want to see my followers list nor the list of people I follow. Even I am not interested to check those trending topics. What I only want is to tweet and that’s it; game over.

So just to tweet this (something limited to 140 chars) I used to need to open Twitter or any other app (client or browser). It takes much time to load and offers me many functionality which I never need at that moment. Also I get distracted by those awesome features and spend much time on those. While tweeting some random thought should take few seconds, I usually end in spending few minutes (few minutes sounds less, instead I should say a fraction of an hour). This situation prompted me to think, is there any application where I can just tweet and nothing?

I searched for an app which can enable to to tweet quickly. Mostly I found many client apps, for iphone, mac etc. and few browser plugins which claims to tweet quickly. I was not interested in those. The first reason is I don’t have those gadgets and the second reason is I don’t think they will not offer much features. I also found one browser app, twickly.com, which claims that you can tweet quickly and save time using that. It also have a drop down list, which contains options to fill your tweet box with ready made statements like “I am listening to”, “I am going to bed” etc. And there is no other features available with them, which I like. There it asks for your twitter username and password; no oAuth. I also tried that to know whether you need to enter your username and password every time you want to tweet quickly using twickly. But it does not work and says “Failure! Wrong Username / Password!”. Believe me, I used my correct username and password. Anyways, if that would be working correctly and asking username and password every time you want to tweet quickly, then it is no use. Also I don’t like a Google CSE search box, a bird image, the logo, a clock image much text and links, clouds on the sky background etc. on that website.

So, I decided to create an app of my own. I never looked at twitter API before. I thought one day I will learn it and build something which will be simple, small and quick; so that I can just tweet quickly. But the problem with me is, I just plan, but never execute those. Last night I was sharing a link, using Tweet Button. And I just looked at it and thought I could use the http://twitter.com/share url and tweet quickly. But I was feeling sleepy and decided to start working on this in the morning. After learning the document and testing this I realized that you need an url to share. This works best to share any URL. So, if you want to share any URL, Twitter Share Bookmarklet is a good option. I even tried to use this to tweet quickly from a newly opened tab. But it denied me saying that there is no valid URL to share.

In the mean while I was learning what Twitter @Anywhere API offers. Then I really liked the Tweet Box feature. And I realized that this is something I need to Tweet Quickly. I created a HTML file and added the minimum required code in it. Then I saw something need to be replaced by the API Key. So, to get the API key, I need to register my application. There I need the name and URL of the application. I was thinking to build this application for myself. So I was not interested to spend money on dedicated domain names. I was planning to name the application as QT (Quick Tweet) and to use on the subdomain of debiprasad.net as qt.debiprasad.net. While thinking about QT, the word QuTee came in to my mind. As it sounds like Cutie, I decided to search for available domain names for QuTee. I bought qutee.in and qutee.net. I decided to use qutee.in for this app and to reserve qutee.net for any future use (I am not sure whether I will be able to use it in the future and get back the invested money). And all done, Qutee is live.

What’s the beauty of QuTee?

The beauty of QuTee is it offers to tweet quickly. Nothing else. It uses less code, so it can be loaded on your browser quickly. It needs you to authorize the app, so that it can tweet for you. This authorization needed once and works forever, unless you revoke access. As most of the people stay logged in to twitter on their browser, it does not take much time to authorize QuTee. There is no other thing to distract you except a label, remaining text counter, a text box to type in your tweet and a button to tweet that message. You can close that tab/window or keep it open when you are done with tweeting. To make it faster and to save much of my time, I have planned to not to add any tracking code. So, if you are using it, then please comment here or reply me on Twitter (@debiprasad). Also remember the domain name or bookmark it, so that you can open it quickly to tweet quickly.

I was planning to say this as “The Quickest way to Tweet”. But I have not done enough research and testing to ensure whether it’s the quickest way or not. So not settled with the term “Quicker”.

What’s next?

The @Anywhere API is loading much features in the background as javascript files. And we don’t need all of those at QuTee. I have not yet checked whether those javascript files able to cache or not. So, in future I will try to minimize the time it takes to load. And I promise, I will not add any new features to this application. Hope you like QuTee and save your time while tweet quickly.