This article was originally published on the Laicos blog, on December 15, 2015.

tl;dr We pulled Fuse because of complications with FB API for messaging and Twitter’s write-restriction due to grouping social feeds.

After about 200 emails asking “what happened to Fuse?”, I’ve decided to write up a short post about 1) what happened, 2) what our plans are and 3) what else we’re working on.

As the story goes, in early 2012 Kyle and I met in my office in CA to discuss what we were going to do together. We knew we wanted to build stuff, but didn’t know how to collaborate on it, or what to do to make it official. And so, Laicos was born (5/2012). At the time, Laicos was a company we would put all of our projects under, in hopes they take off. Plus, now we’d have a vehicle to either sell the services to consumers, or sell the products to companies.

We had 100s of ideas between us, but the most viable and timely was Fuse, a social media aggregator to manage all of your networks within one app. Merged feeds, all notifications, and messages within one app. The differentiator here was that our app would allow the user to take action without leaving the app. We decided to move forward and have the application built, and contracted a local (Tampa) design shop, outsourcing the development work since we didn’t yet have an in-house team. The application development took much longer than expected, was very frustrating, but turned out ok, and was usable, so we decided to push it out. Techcrunch picked up the launch and posted an article, and from that we gained about 10K users. (Thanks, TC).

Things were going smoothly for a while. Out of the blue, April 9, 2015, Twitter dropped us a line to us letting us know we are violating their terms and condition by merging our feeds, and with that, they’ve pulled our API permissions.

With the recent changes to Facebook’s API (Messages) and Twitter’s hammer-drop, we pulled the app from the app store with about 15K active users and $1200 in total revenue, at a 12% conversion rate (which is pretty good in the app world).

Being as it’s pointless to fight with Twitter / FB, we archived the app and started to work on features within Fuse we felt would be valuable outside of Fuse. From that, Compose (beta) was born.

Now with a full team of in-house developers, our very own UI/UX designer and a full product team at our disposal, we were able to create something new. Compose is (currently) a web based application that allows users to post anything they type to any connected network they’d like, simultaneously.

Compose was built using our Fuse API, an API inspired by the Fuse app. Fuse API allows us and other developers to quickly build apps using social networking / media APIs, without dealing directly with the networks. Developers can use our API to connect to any / all networks they desire, quickly, simply, and for free (for now).

We do have plans to work on Fuse app in the future, and are working with Twitter to un-restrict our access. In the meantime, we’re developing tools to make social media easier, more fun, and more efficient.

Keep checking our Products page and our Blog to find out what we’re doing next. Also, feel free toshare your feedback, features and/or ideas.