TweetLater.com will be unavailable on Saturday May 30, 2009 between 8:00 AM EST and 11:00 AM EST.

During that time no automation will take place, and scheduled tweets and DMs will not be published.

When the site is available again, scheduled tweets and DMs that should have been published during the maintenance window will be published as soon as possible. Follower processing will then also resume where it stopped at the start of the window.

If you have any time-critical tweets or DMs, please modify their scheduled times now so that the times fall outside the maintenance window.

This blog and the support ticket system will remain online during the maintenance window.

Update:

The maintenance has been completed.

If you are still seeing the “down for maintenance page” with the message about propagation of the new IP address, you may want to consider switching over to use the DNS servers at OpenDNS.com on your computer.

In the fight against spam over the weekend, something horrible went wrong with new code in the tweet posting script. In some cases it duplicated scheduled recurring tweets. Go figure. Fix one thing and break another.

All recurring tweets that appear to be duplicates have been placed in the red error condition for you to review.

You can either bulk delete them with the Tweets, Delete function in the top menus, or, if it is a valid recurring tweet, you can simply edit and reschedule it.

There should be one non-red recurring (and still active) tweet, of which all the red ones are duplicates.

You may also find that some of your Ping.fm recurring tweets have been advanced several recurs into the future. Unfortunately we cannot fix that by means of a script. We ask that you edit those recurring tweets and reset the scheduled date and time to what it is supposed to be.

Apologies for the inconvenience.

As you probably know, the new follower vetting feature of TweetLater is very popular and very powerful in helping you follow only those folks you want to follow and yet enjoy the time-saving benefits of automation at the same time.

If you haven’t tried it yet, please do so. Follower vetting interrupts the auto-follow process for 72 hours and gives you the opportunity to decide whether you want to follow, ignore, or block a new follower.

Up to now you’ve been able to define your rules, which pre-selected the decisions for you so that you could quickly scan the list and record the decisions. But, you had no insight into how other people decided over the same followers. Did they approve the person, ignore the person, or block the person? You didn’t know.

We have now added aggregate (and anonymous) information to each new follower that will tell you what percentage of people approved the person, what percentage ignored the person, and what percentage blocked the person.

We hope this helps you keeping your Friends list in high quality, and getting rid of Twitter spammers.

To activate follower vetting on your Twitter account, login to TweetLater, click the Accounts menu tab and then the List Accounts sub-menu tab. Then click the Edit link of your Twitter account.

Select the vet new followers option. Important: You must also select either the auto-follow option or the welcome note option (or both), for follower vetting to work. If you don’t select either of those options, then there will never be anything to vet.

We’ve just switched on this feature on May 18, 2009. Over the coming weeks and months you will see more and more followers with percentages greater than zero, as we accumulate everyone’s decisions.

As part of this enhancement, and since we now keep a history of your decisions, you will now also never see the same follower more than once in your vetting list. That will deal very sweetly with the people who play the follow, unfollow, follow, unfollow game.

We are very pleased to announce that TweetLater now has an Application Programming Interface (API), which can be used by other developers to integrate their applications with TweetLater.

Twitter’s API is what enables you to use applications such as TweetDeck, Seesmic Desktop, Digsby, etc.

With TweetLater’s API those developers can now expand the functions of their applications and enable you to use TweetLater in those applications.

The API enables you to add, edit, and delete scheduled tweets. TweetLater Professional users can manipulate recurring tweets as well as scheduled @replies and DMs. More features will be added in the future. We just wanted to “get the API out the door” with this initial set of functions and not get bogged down in “enhancement paralysis”.

There is no additional charge for using the API.

The detail specs of the API are available at:

http://www.tweetlaterapi.com

Change is good, it is often said, and we hope this change will be good from your perspective.

Up to now you could delegate the management of your Twitter account to another TweetLater Professional user.

That has now changed.

You can now delegate your Twitter account management to both TweetLater Free and TweetLater Professional users.

What they can do on your account is determined by the TweetLater features they have access to in their accounts.

If you need someone to simply enter and edit scheduled tweets for you, then all they need is a TweetLater Free account.

If you want them to schedule recurring tweets, use TweetCockpit, etc., then they would need a TweetLater Professional account.

You can delegate your account to as many TweetLater users as you want.

Note: You still need a TweetLater Professional account to be able to do the delegation.