It is not often that one hears the word Microsoft in a conversation about an open source software project. That’s why I was interested to chat with the MahTweets project overlord Paul Jenkins (@Aeoth) at Microsoft’s REMIX10 Conference (#remixau) about this social media aggregation client.

I asked what is special and different about this project, and Paul said:

“unlike a lot of other clients this one focuses solely on Windows, rather than trying to be all things to all platforms”

He also noted that “this enables us to personalise it a lot better, it’s an open source project too.”

Then I asked what are some of the cool features of MahTweets? And Paul’s answer was:

“Streaming realtime search is probably the best feature. During the ABC program Q and A (#qanda) there are so many tweets it’s hard to keep up and our streaming search pushes all of the tweets to your MahTweets client.”

I noted that it’s pretty unusual to see both ‘open source’ and ‘Microsoft’ in the same sentence. Then Nick Hodge from Microsoft explained that “the reason why MahTweets is so advanced is that it uses a lot of pre-existing open source elements such as TweetSharp, Hammock, Json.NET, IronPython along with the goodwill and effort of the development community.”

Nick also commented that “it comes down to making a client you can use day in and day out for things like Twitter and Facebook”.

Paul noted that there are about 2,500 users each for Twitter and Facebook via OAuth.

Which had me asking how they have found working in with Twitter and Facebook APIs and OAuth?

Paul said “I like OAuth; Twitter’s API is shaky at best - they’ll change things that break 90% of the clients and change it back because it doesn’t work; and Facebook is worse. The Facebook documentation is very bad.”

You can checkout MahTweets at www.mahtweets.com