Well, that was quite a year... It is curious how the days go by so fast yet January seems like such a damned long time ago. It’s been a busy one for us and in true schedule-filling style we thought we’d give you a little synopsis of ‘la dolce vita’ at Codegent in the year 2010.

The New Year heralded the birth of the Codegent Apps team, headed up by Mark and Luke, to focus on the development of web applications. And they’ve been busy bees, launching webcamsnapper (as seen on Brizzly, Twitpic, Daily Booth), Twilert and Twitbooth and developing getDash which is due for launch in early January. We even brought Dustin Curtis over from the States to work with us on the interface development of getDash back in March.

Mark has also been making his voice heard around the globe, invited to attend South by South-West in March as part of the UK Digital Mission. He’s also been out and about in London, speaking at live events and hobnobbing with the bright young things of the internet.

On the agency side there have been launches a-plenty for clients old and new: a few stand outs include sites for the British Library, 4 for the Mental Health Foundation, The Hoxton and Searcys. We’ve run Facebook campaigns for Pepsi and built a healthy collection of iPhone and iPad Apps: you can get a bit more info on of this work on our portfolio. It’s also been another year of awards, with Tepilo and The Hoxton picking up silverware in the w3 Awards and nominations in the BIMAs.

We’ve been pretty busy too on the staff front with people coming and going. Lauren packed her bags and went off travelling, whilst Aidan finally caved in and joined us full-time along with Nor, Panu, Bruna, Agnieszka, Michael & Joseph – quite the band of merry men! The office is starting to get a bit full and it won’t be too long before we need to start thinking about a new home.

There have been weddings (Mr and Mrs Kane and Mr and Mrs Tangnoi), babies (David and Jane – due in about a week), a new swanky office in Bangkok and I got another bike.

So Father Time marches on. Au revoir 2010, I think you could say it has been a successful one. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all.

We are really pleased to announce the re-launch of our popular Twitter application - Twilert - at the SXSW Interactive Conference in Austin Texas as part of the UK Digital Mision.

Twitter search alerts via email

Twilert is a Twitter application that lets you receive regular email updates of tweets containing your brand, product, service... well any keyword you like really! In a nutshell, its like Google Alerts, only on Twitter.

Why the need to re-launch?

Last year Twilert was unfortunately a victim of its own success. It was featured in publications such as Twitter Marketing for Dummies, numerous high profile blogs, as well as being regularly mentioned on Twitter itself and it began to hit issues scaling against the demand of the number of users we had. Sadly we had to switch the service off and rethink the architecture.

The platform has been completely re-built to perform much better and scale efficiently against the Twitter API. We have also developed a more user friendly web interface to help you manage your Twilerts and add new ones really easily.

Have a look for yourself! www.twilert.com

If you have any suggestions or feedback please feel free to get in touch on support@twilert.com and we will do our best to help you out. Thanks to all our users for the support so far and we hope you enjoy using the new service.

Have heard about our latest development?!! Don't tell me you have never heard of Twilert, I won't believe you! Twilert has been a real buzz machine since its launch a few weeks ago and in this world where empowered users can express anything they like, you had better start using it straight away! Before looking at Twilert world’s coverage, let’s first explain how it works and how it can help you...

Twilert stands for Twitter + alert.

In a prior post, I mentioned the manual monitoring tools like Twitter Search or Tweetscan. But wouldn’t it be far better to receive regular email updates of tweets containing any keyword you want to monitor?

Twilert is an email alert/notification service for Twitter. It’s like Google Alerts but for Twitter! This Twitter application, built by the Codegent Team in less than 3 weeks, is an amazing tool for people who need to listen what is being said about their name, brand, products, services, industry, employees...

Twilert is much more than a mere search alert service. By using the "Advanced settings", you can filter relevant tweets by keywords, author, recipient, location, link-location, and attitude (positive, negative or neutral). For a bit more insight on the features, here is a video created by a Twilert user:

Today, Twilert has 2000 users in 70 countries, receiving more than 5000 Twilerts. Many people are talking about Twilert on Twitter and on their blogs both here and abroad! Google Blog search shows that there are over 7,000 blog posts about Twilert. Below you can appreciate a small bit of this amazing global buzz:

English:

• Chatting with the man behind Twilert - the new Twitter alert service
• Twilert makes it easy to follow tweets about your clients. (And your agency.)
• Twilert: Tweet alerts via e-mail
• Two ways to track brand buzz on Twitter to suit your information diet
• Twilert: digital data mining and identifying motivated audiences

Spanish:

• Twilert: Alertas de Twitter para seguimiento de marcas o parejas
• Twilert: Alertas por correo de Tweet interesantes
• Twilert: Recibir alertas para determinadas palabras en Twitter

French:

• Twilert, un Google Alert dédié à Twitter
• Twilert - Alerte par mail de certains Tweets
• Twilert : Alerte mail Twitter

Brazilian:

• Acompanhe a opinião do pessoal do Twitter por e-mail
• Twilert, um aplicativo Twitter que rastreia palavras-chave escolhidas por você
• Twilert: Receba por e-mail tweets relevantes

Deutsch:

• Twilert: Benachrichtigungen, wenn bestimmte Begriffe getwittert werden
• Themen-Monitoring bei Twitter mit Twilert
• Twilert schickt Twitter-Mails

Italian:

• Scopri se su Twitter viene citata una determinata parola con Twilert
• Twilert, monitora una parola su Twitter e ricevi degli alert quando viene citata!
• Twilert: Rimanere aggiornati in Twitter via email

Japanese:

• www.socialmedia.jp
• web-marketing.zako.org

Amongst all these blog posts about Twilert, 3 of them in particular drew my attention:

Firstly, KidTechGuru, a 14-year-old boy from Singapore, who’s probably one of the world's youngest professional bloggers and technology expert, explains in a great post what Twilert is all about and how it works.

Then, Twilert was recently cited in a post on Mashable as a tool to help you focus on the signal rather than all the Twitter noise.

Finally, The social media guru Guy Kawasaki, author of Reality Check, wrote a really interesting post on How to Use Twitter as a Twool listing Twilert as a tool to monitor what people are saying about you, your company, and your product.

In addition to this great coverage on blogs, Twilert was named Mashup of the day on the 5 December 2008.

Via word-of-mouth the news is spreading fast; the tool is powerful, so why don’t you give it a try at www.twilert.com? Set-up any keywords you would like to receive alerts about and start interacting with other twitter users discussing topics aligned to your keywords.