Back in the spring of 2007, I was introduced to Twitter and soon thereafter their API. At the time, I had little programming experience with third-party APIs, but was immediately taken by the simplicity and robustness of what Alex was building, and tutored by the growing community of Twitter developers.

For my first project, I decided to play with Twitter’s direct message feature. The idea was simple: send me a direct message that included a time (number of minutes) and a message, and I would reply with a direct message when the specified time had expired. It was a sort of alarm clock…an egg timer…a timer. In May 2007, @timer was born.

Three years later, @timer is still actively used, with over 16,000 followers (you have to follow in order to direct message). Happy belated birthday, lil’ buddy.

On a related note, I’ve updated @timer to use OAuth (as of August 16th, Twitter will be shutting of basic authentication). I suppose this is a the real reason for the post, but the birthday wishes seemed overdue and appropriate. So, enjoy the new and improved @timer…