Now Crowy is not able to continue its service

Now Crowy.net is not able to continue its service. From today, we make Crowy as an open-source, and looking for volunteers to make Crowy continue.

Good afternoon. It's Kimura from co-meeting team. Thank you for using Crowy so far.

Crowy is first started as a service which I developed personally for applying the Mashup Award 6 in Nov 2011, but now continuously provided its service for more than 2years, and acquired more than 40,000 users today.

The thing is, we had an Announcement from Twitter Inc. about the change of API and the terms of service in last September from August last year. IF we are NOT able to adjust for this change before 5th of March, Crowy CAN NOT continue to provide its service in future.

Crowy is operated and maintained by co-meeting Inc., but since the main product of the company, co-meeting, requires a huge developing resources, Crowy could not get much resource to provide any additional development in last 1 year.

However, because we have so many users who loved to spend time on this product, we really want to avoid the termination of the service, so we tried to find ANY way, including transferring of the business, but unfortunately, couldn’t find a way to continue.

So, I decided to take the last chance, which is, to ask YOU a favor of help. I want to ask volunteers to develop Crowy as the adjusted- service for the change of Twitter API/terms. To make it easier for anyone, we made a decision to make Crowy as an open-source.

https://github.com/co-meeting/crowy

We publish the source code on Github, so please “fork”, fix and send us a “Pull Request”.

The main points for this fixing is following two,

• Change API from v1.0 to v1.1
• Tightening of the tweet-display format （ for details: Developer Display Requirements ）

To learn the essence of the changes of Twitter API / terms, this article may be the best-helpful summary.

https://dev.twitter.com/blog/changes-coming-to-twitter-api

Required skills are Python, JavaScript, CSS, HTML, depends on the contents/features you’d like to develop. Display Format changes could be done only with the knowledge of HTML and CSS alone, probably. Also, a translation of the document of Twitter Inc. would be very much welcome, as it enables more developers to join this activity.

As written in Announcement of Twitter Inc. (here) there’s not much time before the deadline, which is 5th of March. As a service-provider, we are very ashamed of this situation, but we really NEED your help, to continue the service, so please.

Also, if it will not be able to be adjusted before the deadline, we are very sad to announce, but Crowy will be stopped its service.

To be honest, we already give-upped to monetize Crowy, as the current ads on the service is much less than its infrastructure expenses. But we are planning to run this Crowy as a Free-service in future, even if volunteers may joined and helped out.

For Open-source version, we publish the license as the MIT License so you may use it to make other products based on Crowy, or you can integrate it into other products, or whatever, it’s freely available. It is possible for other companies to provide the same service. Even if Crowy ends its history, we are happy if Crowy affects, in any way, to make your life better.

We deeply apologize about this inconvenience to the users. Sincerely, I am grateful that the service received your interest and love, until today.

Co-meeting Ltd is going to dedicate our best to improve the group collaboration tool “co-meeting”. Thanks and please look after our company and service..