After a fun and eventful year Cllr Tweeps has regretfully decided that he just doesn't have the time to give his public duties the attention they deserve.

He has spoken with the Town Clerk and has resigned his seat on Tweeps council. No by-election is planned.

Mr Tweeps, as he is now, had a good run at it. He was listing at least three times as many councillors as TweetyHall and hopes he was a good resource for councillors and members of the public hoping to find their local politicians on Twitter.

Sadly, he was never a full time politician and that, in the end, meant he would never be able to compete. It had been run as a free community resource - there was no allowance or grant behind it. While this was good for the public purse, it meant that we could never send people to events and there was no way we were going to be able to buy Ordnance Survey or postcode data. And when the choice was work that paid the mortgage or work on Cllr Tweeps the latter was always going to lose; that was something we could not justify when, ahead of an election, it's likely more and more councillors will start using Twitter.

We did consider looking for ways of funding the site and our work on it. But, frankly, in this climate we can't help but feel there are better things for government, national and local, to be spending their money on - while Twitter is fun only around 10% of the UK have an account, with only around 10% of them using it regularly, and they tend not to be in those 'hard to reach' groups that are disaffected with, or excluded from, the political process. Additionally, councils and councillors are increasingly starting to list Twitter usernames on their own websites which reduces the need for a national directory - we are clear that our purpose is not about talking to each other, but helping residents find their councillors, there's little to be gained in duplicating a small part of a council website.

We would not rule out Cllr Tweeps returning if we suddenly find a generous donor or the someone insists on throwing money at it (or we just find ourselves with a lot more free time on our hands) but unless and until that happens rather than see the site slowly suffer we have decided to bring it all to an abrupt end and go out while we are ahead.

Thank-you to everyone who helped us and for their words of support and encouragement along the way.

UPDATE Our directory lives on - now part of OpenlyLocal