GTweet came back to life yesterday as “Beta 2” after being ported to Python and moving to the Google App Engine.

I was very excited to get the new version out the door, but the accomplishment was tainted by slower-than-I’d-like response times when viewing the feed in Google Reader. The development environment that I use for testing new versions of GTweet uses compiled C binaries to speed up the PyCrypto library but the live environment of Google App Engine does not.

The lag that resulted from the pure Python encryption library prompted me to implement OAuth so I could avoid dealing with Twitter account information all together.

OAuth is a different way of authenticating with Twitter. Instead of providing your Twitter user name and password to GTweet (which it then uses to access your protected feeds), OAuth allows you to grant GTweet access to your Twitter account without yielding your login credentials.

To initiate the (very quick) process, click the “Sign in to Twitter” button on GTweet.net.

Beta 2 URLs still work for now, but I’ll probably remove backwards compatibility after a suitable grace period, and all new features will only be available to OAuth users. I apologize to those who have to generate yet another GTweet URL, but I promise the quicker load times and new features will make it worth it.

Some quick notes about Beta 3:

  1. The occasional problems that were cropping up with the sign-up form have gone away because there is no more sign-up form. Related: there is no more unethical treatment of elephants, either.

  2. I still have not had time to implement the link to star individual tweets, but it’s forthcoming.

  3. The number of tweets pulled on each refresh is back to 20 for now (sorry, Andrew) but hopefully I can raise that limit after some more performance testing.

  4. I’m gradually becoming more comfortable with Python, but I’d still very much appreciate any comments and/or bug reports. Leave a comment here or tweet @adamjarret - thanks!

GTweet