Developer Chris Lacy was, up until a few months ago working on one of the most promising and popular Twitter clients around – Tweet Lanes – however, with Twitter about to implement a 100,000 user token limit on third party Twitter apps, he re-evaluated the project and decided to focus his efforts on his other project Action Launcher.
This morning however, Chris announced that not only has he updated Tweet Lanes to utilise the new Twitter API v1.1 (Full Changelog : here,) he has also open sourced the code in the hopes that it becomes a community driven project. In his Google Plus post this morning, Chris states:
A few months ago I announced that I had ceased active development on Tweet Lanes. This was a tough decision for me given how much time and effort I put had put into the project, but given the reality of Twitter’s hard 100k user token limit, I felt then (as I do now) that moving on was the right thing for me to do.
But just because I am no longer actively developing Tweet Lanes, doesn’t mean that development of the app has to stop.
So with that in mind, I’m pleased to announce that Tweet Lanes has gone open source.
Chris has released the full source code for Tweet Lanes which you can download from his Github repository HERE
In his post on Google Plus Chris outlines what he can and cannot commit to and has obviously put some serious thought into how the project should proceed from here. His “call to arms” includes a request for a Dev Lead as well as a community manager to hopefully drive the development and co-ordinate communication to the users of the app. Don’t be under any false illusions, the positions are unpaid and will almost certainly consume vast amounts of time but you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that you’re part of something really special.
If I had the spare time (and in an ideal world, some skill with Java) I’d certainly dive into this. I love the app and think it’s a huge shame for something so good to die due to the inability of Twitter to recognize that they’re doing the wrong thing by developers with their 100,000 token limit.
Keen? Email Chris to let him know your credentials [email protected]
I don’t think he knows what open source means.
The dev thinks he has open sourced it for “non-commercial” uses. Unfortunately for him, that’s not how open source works. If it’s under the Apache license, then anyone can make any use of it that the license allows (which is pretty much anything), including commercial use.
No great loss – I hate to say it but Twitter is a dying platform. Kudos to Chris for making the right call.