As many of you have noticed, UAETweets has been acting weird for the past few weeks, missing out on some auto-updates, not adding as many new users as it used to, absence of active users, trending topics, etc.

All of that was due to serious scalability issues, caused by our previous infrastructure which wasn’t built to handle the unanticipated accelerating growth in terms of users, tweets, and the processing needed to generate what the UAETweets have.

During the past couple of weeks, we’ve completed a partial migration of UAETweets to the awesome Amazon cloud, in order to lighten the load on our servers and have virtually limitless room for future growth.

Starting now, UAETweets will become significantly more stable, and more timely in terms of adding new twitter users, displaying their tweets and displaying

In addition to that, we will be able to roll out some very exciting features over the coming weeks, many of which we’ve been working on in the background and were halted by the previous limits.

Stay tuned, UAETweets journey has just begun!

We thought that the best way to start 2010 is with a new design! Making the website even more minimal and removing everything but the the essential information.

We decided to use a beautiful blue sky background (with a cloud that vaguely resembles our logo) to add some color as a change from the black-and-white theme of the previous design. As for font choice, we went for the elegant yet clear “Courier New” which resembles the output of a typewriter; adding a minimal retro-feeling to the website.

Hope you like the new look, and let us know what you think and how we can make it better.

We’re an opinionated small company, and as such we adopt a certain set of principles and guidelines that we believe in, and which we think will allow us to passionately do great work and make the web a better place.

Innovative Approach

We approach our projects using new “preferably never been tried” approaches, allowing us to get new “preferably never been achieved” results and solutions.

We know that regular solutions work, get things done, and everyone is happy with them but we strive to find and create exceptional and cutting-edge solutions, the likes of which have never been done for our projects and clients.

We love to be different and for our projects to stand out from the pack, and we work hard for that.

Experimentation

As scary as it may sound, we love to experiment with new ideas and push the envelope by trying things for the first time.

Breakthroughs are achieved by venturing into new grounds, tinkering with new concepts and testing ridiculous ideas, and plus experimenting is fun, risky and rewarding, we do it all the time and we try to get our clients to do it with us.

Rapid Prototyping

It’s the art and science of breaking a everything into smaller, manageable chunks, that can be finished and validated quickly and efficiently without having to wait through the whole process for the final result.

We believe that when things work, it will be apparent from the beginning and that most great ideas happen during the development of an application, so we make sure that we get something out as soon as possible and then iterate on it till we reach the final result.

We believe in the natural evolution of any project that occur on a frequent basis according to real-world feedback, our project timelines are intentionally short to encourage continuos involvement in the application as it is created.

We live and die by Rapid prototyping, to make sure that we don’t waste our time and most importantly yours.

Short Timelines

The rapid prototyping methodology that we use in development and consulting projects allow us to breakdown projects into smaller projects, which take short timelines that span days instead of weeks and months.

Minimal and simple design

Less is more, and that starts with web design; We love to reduce web design to its basic and necessary elements.

We try our best to cut back on flash elements, heavy graphics, and complex color palettes, and instead we create clean, simple designs and intuitive self-explanatory user interfaces.

We believe that perfection is reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

No matter how cool your interface is, it would be better if there were less of it - Alan Cooper.

Utilization of available tools

The web brought the contribution of millions of people right into our hands, so when we need something for our projects, we make sure to scour the web, to find everything that could be of use to us. If you need something and we are able to find it for you, we will refer you to it and help you customize it according to your needs and start using it.

We hate reinventing the wheel, and we think it’s better for us to work on new cool things than to do the same things over and over again.

Open, web-based and state-of-the-art Tools

When we search for tools to help us do our projects, we look for open, web-based and fun tools that use common web standards and utilize the latest web technologies.

Almost everyone is trying to come up with ways to measure an individual’s importance on Twitter, using different methods, such as number of followers, following to followers ratio, number of retweets, replies to tweets ratio, etc. And only recently Twitter gave us a new albeit very important metric to measure as well, which is lists.

The number of the lists that you’re on is one of the most important indicators of how influential you are, how many people are really reading your tweets, and a measure of how interesting you really are.

We’ve crunched the numbers of all UAE twitter users, which are part of UAETweets and came up with the list of the top 100 most listed users in the UAE.

The list can be found here http://uaetweets.com/topusers

This list will be continuously updated, and will reflect the present ranks and numbers every time you visit the page.

No one can deny that Arabic is one of the best looking written languages out there, it’s considered a highly sophisticated art form in addition of it being a communication medium. Yet because of the known web restrictions, we’re stuck with a few standard (dull looking) Arabic fonts on the web.

Tiba3a aims to solve the problem of displaying varied and beautiful Arabic fonts on websites, in a way that looks consistent across all browsers, it’s a platform that hosts fonts and allow anyone to use them in an easy and fast way.

On a technical level, Tiba3a will depend on the new generation of browsers, with the ability to link to a font. The service will work through securely hosting the fonts source files on our server and providing a licensing scheme for websites willing to make use of the fonts.

Tiba3a will offer a solid level of protection that protects the rights of type owners and designers and makes it impossible for anyone to get a copy of the used font.

This service is inspired by Typekit, which launched a few months ago to tackle the same issue for English fonts. It opened our eyes to the possibility of doing the same for Arabic fonts.

We’re already in talks with some Arabic fonts foundries, and we’re planning to include all of them as part of the project; hoping for their cooperation, because the success of this project will mainly hinge on them and their involvement. There’s not much we can do on our own in such an endeavor.

We encourage all interested parties - especially Arabic fonts foundries - to get in touch us, to make this project a reality and help us evolve the Arabic web.

 

Working on UAETweets opened our eyes to the interesting possibility of creating a service that allows anyone to create their own lenses using whatever criteria they choose… later on and after we launched UAETweets we got confirmation of this possibility through a number of email requests from people interested in leasing/buying the code behind UAETweets.

Enter twtlens, a service still in Alpha that allows you to create your own twitter lens on any group of users “community” that have something in common (location, work, interests, passions, etc.), to provide a quick view of the community pulse, and what’s on their minds at any given moment.

 

 

In the Alpha release, created Lenses will have the following features:

1. Allow customization of the lens theme with your own logo, color scheme and background image.
2. Aggregate all tweets from the community.
3. Make those tweets searchable.
4. Extract trending topics (words and #hashtags).
5. Extract popular links shared by the community.
6. Extract latest links.
7. Make search results and trends available as RSS feeds.
8. Choose which widgets to have as part of the lens.

You can create your own lens for free here, we have limited testing slots open at this moment.

We’re just getting started with developing twtlens and will be adding new features on a weekly basis, but please do let us know what you think of it and in case you have any request or issue with the service.

 

During the past week, we launched UAETweets, a twitter lens on the UAE that provides a quick view of the UAE community pulse, and what’s on their minds at any given moment.

It started off with some tinkering and experimentation with twitter-based ideas such as extracting local UAE trends, searching in the tweets only by UAE users, figuring out the most popular links in the UAE, etc. And then we realized that we could package all of these features in a full-blown website, and it took us about 2 weeks to get it done.

 

You can read more about the website on StartupArabia coverage and in an interview on the National’s beepbeep blog.

 

We’re just getting started with UAETweets, we have tons of stuff in mind for it, but please do let us know if you have any feature request, feedback or something you don’t like and we’ll take all of that into consideration.

As you might have noticed, we rolled out a new design of our Website since the past couple of days and we were going through some stuff to make sure it works flawlessly.

In this design, we wanted to experiment with other aspects of minimalism and simplicity and thus we came up with the idea of doing a one-page website. So we went back to the old website and we tried to come up with a way to fit all of the information inside one page, to make it even more quick, simple and fun for the visitors to browse through our stuff without having to load a single page.

We hope that you like this new design and as always let us know what you think in the comments.

And make sure to take a look at the little easter egg we left in there… Featured Tweets.