Twitter first announced User Streams at Chirp, where Twitter Director of Platform Ryan Sarver told a crowd of eager developers about a new feature and API that would get data in real time and without rate limits. Onstage at the conference, Sarver pinged content from Twitter.com onto TweetDeck in real time. The API was made available to devs for a brief period during the conference, but any apps or features created around it were not shown to the general public.
However, the company did open the API to two partners in July: TweetDeck and Echofon. At that time, Twitter also announced a new Streaming API product called Site Streams.
Today, Kalucki took to Google Groups to let developers know that the User Streams product launch "is moving along as planned.
"We haven't had any downtime, and we've only had a few subtle functionality problems to refine. In short, all is going very well... We intend to move this product into an open beta test period soon, and then on into full production shortly thereafter."
Originally, the open beta was slated for late August. Still, we'd be just as happy to see a smooth launch in September. Twitter's roadmap for User Streams includes an at-scale launch in Q3 or Q4 of this year.