It all started about a year ago, on last WinDays conference in Opatija when I had a cup of coffee with guys from Shout’em (that’s how we do business in Croatia :-)). We talked about Silverlight and they asked me to build an application that will show shouts (“tweets” from Shout’em network) on the big screen during concerts, events etc. Essentially, a “twitter” wall for Shout’em. Unfortunately, at least for me, they eventually decided to develop the application themselves in WPF if I recall correctly. Wrong choice if I may add, but no hard feelings :-)

At the beginning of this year, MIX conference in Las Vegas organized the contest called Mix10k. The goal was to build an web app in under than 10 kilobytes, using Silverlight, HTML5 or Gestalt. The idea about twitter wall seemed perfect so I took the night off and had a working application in 6 hours, just few hours before the deadline. The main problem was to reduce it to 10k – I was renaming variables to a, aA and Aa to save space, using lambda expressions, removing whitespace and even some features at the end (silly things, like link to my Twitter account). I didn’t win any of the prises, competition was really good, but i got “this is awesome” from Scott Hanselman :-) followed by a great buzz on Twitter.

I promised to build a new version of Wall of Silver and few days ago I have finally managed to find some time to do so. It has been tested by small, yet great group of friends (thank you all) and now it is ready to see the world. It’s officially in beta, just because these days it’s cool to have the word “beta” in a logo.

You can use it wherever you like, for free and no strings attached. I would appreciate if you let me know where do you use it, especially if used on public events, just to keep a track and brag about it. You can customize the application to fit your needs (just use the form on the bottom – nice showcase of communication between Silverlight and JavaScript/jQuery), but there are few more, hidden features and parameters you can use that I will reveal on the Twitter and here, on the blog. For example, there is an option to use Shout’em networks instead of Twitter, but I’ll announce that in public when fully tested.

Let me know what do you think – comments, questions, suggestions and feature requests are welcome! Have fun!