Monthly Archives: February 2010
Latest Project: BirdHerd
This is mostly a repost, but I wanted to let everyone know about my latest project: BirdHerd.
I built BirdHerd because I needed a way for the many startups I work with to use Twitter effectively.
In the past, we always just shared a common password amongst team members, but this became troublesome when a team member would leave and we’d have to change the password, and then we’d have to tell everyone what the new password is. Or someone would forget the password, reset it it to something new, and effectively lock everyone out. Needless to say, this was not ideal, and had the undesired effect of causing people to not update the group Twitter account as often as they could.
Next, I started looking at a few existing Twitter tools, but I definitely wanted something that would work from any client or device. Our team members use TweetDeck, HootSuite, SMS and the Twitter web site, and I knew that if they had to log into a different web app to update the group account (like other group Twitter tool CoTweet forces you to do), the updates wouldn’t flow as fast as they could/should. I also wanted to use oAuth to manage passwords safely. Most importantly, I wanted to be able to both communicate publicly by posting messages from the Twitter account, but I also wanted to be able to send a private group message to all my team members (through a DM).
I couldn’t find such a tool, and so, with a firm belief that there had to be a better way, BirdHerd was born – and you can try it right now. It’s even getting some good initial press! I hope it makes using Twitter with your group or team easy.