2above.com

I have a soft spot for simple twitter app. Since I started dedicating this blog to twitter eco-system, localtweeps.com has been on my upcoming top twitter apps’ list. It’s simple: to seed the future growth of this humble app, they ask people to tweet about one thing that everyone has: zip code. It turned out people love it! Fascinated by the explosive growth it has experienced, I reached out to the folks behind localtweeps.com for an interview. Here we are, Zack Steven, co-founder and CEO of localtweeps.com.

1. where did you get the idea of starting localtweeps.com (love to
hear how your background, partnership served up to the initial success
of the project)

Zack: I started using Twitter more actively a few months ago and found it
surprisingly difficult to find relevant users to follow, especially locally.
All of the search tools seemed to be based on follower count, which I don’t
think is the best measure of authenticity. Even a search by location
returned uneven results because the location field in Twitter doesn’t have
standard formatting.

The team that developed localtweeps has been leveraging technology to
strengthen local communities for a while. Our first offering
www.buythechange.com is a neighborhood based local commerce site in the Twin
Cities that makes it easy for people to buy and sell goods and services with
their friends and neighbors. Twitter is a powerful tool for communication,
and we thought that mapping profiles and content to geography would be
useful in connecting real world communities.

2. how long did it take to bring this from idea to app.

Zack: We released the very first functionality within a week of the idea, but
didn’t go public with it until about 2 weeks later. We’ve been working to
aggressively roll out enhancements based on our own vision and feedback from
users. We’ve got some exciting things in the works.

3. did you expect the explosive growth of localtweeps? what is the
current status of the project (traffic, main usage etc.).

Zack: We didn’t know what to expect, but we’ve been thrilled with the response.
It’s obvious that local matters to a lot of people. It’s a completely
user-created site that has exploded based on people seeing value and telling
their tweeps about it. Our traffic from both new and returning visitors is
strong and people are responding favorably to the updates we’ve released.

4. Who do you consider as main competitors, What is next for
localtweeps.com?

Zack: We’re a simple hyperlocal user-created Twitter directory, which sets us
apart from the competitors who auto-populate content, rank results based on
follower count or rely on the Twitter location field to place users in a
general area. No other service allows people to connect at the ZIP code
level or customize their profile with a hashtag. Any user who lists
themselves at localtweeps can customize their localtweeps listing anytime by
including #LT in any tweet. It’s a great way to share locally relevant
content in your city and ZIP.

We’re focused on providing tools that make local connections and information
sharing easier and expanding our list of international directories. We’ll
keep things simple but we’ve got some cool features in the works – follow
@localtweeps to be the first to hear!

I have been greasemonkey scripts for twitter web for about 10 days, Can’t love it enough. It saves me a lot of time to say the least. You can get it on userscripts.org:

Major benefits:
1. From the web timeline, I can immediately tell who is following me by the little smiley face
2. When you scroll down to the end of the first screen, you don’t have to click on “more” (so annoying!!!), script will automatically expand to next page and on and on.
3. Mouse over the tweets, you will be able to retweet right from twitter timeline.
4. You can see the image and video and conversation/replies tree easily within the timeline. And best of all, it’s freaking fast!
5. When you look at the people who are following you, you will be able to put them into any group you named right away: for example, I’d like to put all twitter app developers into one group so I can easily follow up with them on interview requests.
6. To much to see? Clicking on “setting” on the upper right corner, you will be able to customize the features that you need the most.

Monetizing twitter is a hot subject, while twitter itself has not announce any business plan (apart from its Japanese version which does have sponsored ads), plenty of twit apps, even some business twitter accounts, cheap follower-chasing software have already started making money. Nevertheless, I feel the freshly cooked TwitPub.com has its own noble approach. Hence, I “ringed” the founder Darren Prosper, who was kind enough to give me quick, insightful background information about twitPub. Following is the interview Q&A. Enjoy!

Q: 1. How did you come up with idea?

Derren: We love the concept of Twitter. It’s such a wonderful tool to share your thoughts in such a concise and focused manner – plus it’s available on the web, mobile, iphone and any of your Twitter clients. We thought the premium tweets could be very similar to premium SMS that are available in many countries. People will actually pay per premium SMS (e.g. Joke of the Day, Horoscope, Feng Shui, StockTips and etc) on their phone. The problem here is that most of the content providers needs to be established and pay a big fee to start this platform. With TwitPub, you don’t need to have a startup capital and all you need is a private Twitter account and some good content which you think people will pay to read. Initially, we started TwitPub to support professional authors but any users are free to try out now.

Q: 2. Why paid tweets? Isn’t that outrageous? How do you control the quality of “professionals”?

Darren: I think everybody love free stuffs. The idea of Free is just too compelling. But at the same time, websites and publishers can’t afford to be Free if they wish to be self sustainable in the long term. They need to generate revenue if they wish to continue to deliver better service and great content to its users. TwitPub is just an alternative way for people to support their favorite authors and content providers. E.g. if you like this finance guy who has been giving out great stock tips, then show him the support by subscribing to his premium tweets for as low as 0.99 cents a month. Each content provider on TwitPub has a rating and comments column which allows users to provide their feedback. Buyers get a standard 30 days trial which means they can choose to unsubscribe if they don’t like what they see – and they won’t get charge for that.

Q:3. (You know I will ask this). How many real users (sellers, buyers) are there? How’s growth prospect?

Darren: We’re looking to grow very fast in the near future. We’re in the midst of partnering with bigger content providers to offer more attractive content to users. The growth has been very healthy and encouraging so far.

Q: 4. How long did it take you to develop the app? Do you do it full time with funding or bootstrap?

Darren: About 2 months from conceptual, planning, development to marketing. We’re working on this fulltime with several other interesting projects to be released soon. We’re backed by some private investors.

Q: 5. Finally, What do you see as the key to the future growth? Marketing plan, partnership, technology?

Darren: The idea for TwitPub is to be the marketplace for Twitter so users can buy and sell premium tweets. We would continue to explore this interesting area to help users to monetize their content and provide better service. We know content is key, so we hope to partner with some prominent brands in the near future. As for technology, we are cooking up some new interesting stuffs that might be a game changer. So, watch out for us at www.twitpub.com. Thank you. Note: You can also reach us at info@twitpub.com

Thanks to twitstats.com for this update.

Twitter Clients, Apr 29, 2009

Shows Twitter client usage for all accounts tracked by @twitstat.

(While my twitter followers that are interested in social media continue to grow fast, original followers of mine are bailing out fast, most of them are fitness professionals, enthusiasts; Reading this research article by Nielson helped me understand twitter follower behavior better, hope that will do the same for you.)

First published April 28th, 2009 Posted in Nielsen News, Online And Mobile, by David Martin, Vice President, Primary Research, Nielsen Online

Oprah embarrassed herself on it with a stuck caps lock. That guy from Punk’d competed with “the most trusted name in news” for audience. A befuddled Jon Stewart shook his fist at it in anger. Let there be no doubt: Twitter has grown exponentially in the past few months with no small thanks to celebrity exposure. People are signing up in droves, and Twitter’s unique audience is up over 100 percent in March. But despite the hockey-stick growth chart, Twitter faces an uphill battle in making sure these flocks of new users are enticed to return to the nest.

Follow Vs. Follow-through

Currently, more than 60 percent of Twitter users fail to return the following month, or in other words, Twitter’s audience retention rate, or the percentage of a given month’s users who come back the following month, is currently about 40 percent. For most of the past 12 months, pre-Oprah, Twitter has languished below 30 percent retention.

To understand why this poses a problem for Twitter, check out the chart below. By plotting the minimum retention rates for different Internet audience sizes, it is clear that a retention rate of 40 percent will limit a site’s growth to about a 10 percent reach figure. To be clear, a high retention rate doesn’t guarantee a massive audience, but it is a prerequisite. There simply aren’t enough new users to make up for defecting ones after a certain point.

Maybe we’re jumping the gun. Twitter is still something of a fledgling, and surely some other sites that eventually lived up to Twitter-like hype suffered from poor retention in the early days. Compare it to the two heavily-touted behemoths of social networking when they were just starting out. Doing so below, we found that even when Facebook and MySpace were emerging networks like Twitter is now, their retention rates were twice as high. When they went through their explosive growth phases, that retention only went up, and both sit at nearly 70 percent today.

Twitter has enjoyed a nice ride over the last few months, but it will not be able to sustain its meteoric rise without establishing a higher level of user loyalty. Frankly, if Oprah can’t accomplish that, I’m not sure who can.

by Stuart Foster on April 24, 2009

Look, if we truly knew the answer to the question of how to monetize the newspaper mainstream media, we’d be drinking mai tais on the beach of our very own island in the South Pacific. That said, we do know enough to suggest some ways the MSM, at least, slow the decline in profits.

OK, so what CAN the print MSM do?

1. Dump Print.
After staff, newsprint is the biggest cost factor for newspapers. But sure, we read the CNet story the other day that said only 3 percent of newspaper reading is happening online. So a lot of people are still reading the print edition. How is it, then, that circulation is tanking? (Sure, customer service and delivery problems account for some of that, but not nearly all.)

The people reading papers are getting their information from a wide variety of sites. Some of which are online-only. Some of which, sure, steal from print sites. But if “newspaper” sites made their content available in varying formats that were optimized for reading on a desktop PC, a laptop, an iPhone and a Kindle, among others, that would make the online experience far more palatable.

Let’s face it – the core newsprint audience is getting old. You can’t rely on that audience to be around forever. And providing new ways for them to get their content is only going to make them happier, too. Mrs. Wizork is getting too stiff in the joints to wander down to the end of her driveway each morning, no matter the weather, to pick up a (possibly soggy) newspaper? It’s getting harder to read the typeface? What if you gave her a Kindle or other e-book reader that converted the printed word into speech and she instead subscribed to an electronic version delivered to her reader in her nice warm (or cold, maybe she lives in Arizona) house each morning.

Print is dead. Everyone says it is. To hold onto reasons why it’s not is to shortchange your readers.

2. Hire Ariana Huffington?
OK, few can afford to hire an independently wealthy Internet entrepreneur. But follow her lead.

Hire people who can write who are experts on what they’re blogging about. Heck, some of ‘em will do it for the exposure and minimal payment. Don’t make your existing staff keep doing all the daily journalism they have to do for the core product and ALSO blog. Make some of them purely digital journalists. Their blogs are their beats. Don’t try to do more with less, because you can’t. Well, you can, but you can’t do it well. You know it. And, more importantly, your readers know it. Use the people you have left in your newsrooms to cover what they cover well. If you simply still must have a print edition, have editors take their blogged content and make it fit whatever format you need for the dead tree edition.

Explore new revenue channels through blogging – find sponsors for blogs. If the blog’s about music, get a venue to sponsor. If the blog’s about that particular topic…do outreach, engage your community. Create an army of bloggers with the sanctioned trust of a major newspaper.

3. Allow users to design their own home page.
Every other news aggregator has been doing this since the dawn of the internet. Why can’t you customize a newspaper website’s layout?

To attract a more hardcore audience, you should use a Custom CRM for max web integration. Expand your reach and allow other newspapers to be imported (pass linkjuice onto them as well and they’ll just do the same). Allow third parties like Yelp to integrate their services into the paper. The more customized content that you allow your customers to have access to, the more eyeballs will get to see it. Also, make sure your articles are easily shareable and transferable back to you … and allow people to tweet directly from your site.

Think of your home page like a Google homepage. Let users add RSS feeds to their favorite content around the web and choose their favorite comic strips that you purchase from syndication. Make users able to turn your homepage into their homepage, so they don’t have to go anywhere else.

4. Do breaking news. Or do longform. Don’t try to do both.
When you try to do longform, you get sidetracked by the breaking news of the day. When you do breaking news, you get sidetracked by trying to figure out what longform pieces you’re gonna write about the event. Plus, there’s always some hotshot reporter working on a major longform piece you just can’t pull her off of, so instead of giving your all to the breaking news of the day, you put who you have on the story, rather than who you need.

Breaking news: Own it. Incorporate Twitter streams into the breaking coverage. Monitor the Tweets and comments and follow up on leads from them. Sure, not every day has a major breaking news story. But if you cover your area well, you’ll find far more breaking news than you ever imagined.

Long-form: Do it right. Be the written version of NPR. Delve into your subjects. Cover angles no one else is. Be the site that people go to when they want to know the story behind the story.

You know, do journalism.

5. Stop Interrupting, Start Interacting.
Broadcast media is no longer the accepted form of communication between user and provider. People expect to learn, respond and react to news. You can no longer broadcast something and then ignore its repercussions…the FCC would crucify you for one thing, but more importantly? So would your readers.

Take the example of Colonel Tribune and actually meet, talk and hang out with your audience. Also, take the approach that your story isn’t done once it has been published look at it as if it has just begun.

This by no means is a complete list and MSM has a long way to go. What would you suggest?

I thought it is interesting to take a look at those keywords people are searching about twitter, that led them to this blog:

2above.com
about twibes
seesmic tweetscoop
tweetdeck configuration location mac
twitter client ranking
twitter share
what are twibes
twitter news overload”"
2above.com?
5 power dashboards
above & beyond twitter
add tweetscoop to tweetdeck
ashton kustcher twitter
aston kustcher
best twitter dashboard
building on the twitter platform
ceo zappos
chip lambert network 2 networth businessweek twitter
clout twitter
college humor flutter
comparing twitter and fark
does tweetdeck let you monitor multiple twitter accounts?
following follower twitter behavior
funny twitters
how does twibes work?
how to cancel search in tweetdeck
how to create a dedicate page on twitter
how was twibes made
if i text @ with someone’s name to twitter what happens
jack dorsey strategy
kenny the jet twitter
kenny the jet’s twitter
pizza hut hiring zone
pizza hut twintern
pro twitter
restaurants twitter rush street
seesmic
smallaa
social media
sports personalities on twitter
sprint national commercial 2009
steps to build community in an organization
tipjoy or kirigin or ikirigin or kirigan
tips on building community in an organization
top desktop twitter tweetdeck windows
tweepz
tweet dec verses seesimc
tweetdeck comparison
tweetdeck multiple usernames
tweetdeck update speed
tweetscoop
twevolution 2.0
twintern
twintern press release
twitdom
twitdom or twitdomupdates
twitilyzer
twitter
twitter analyzing
twitter apps sports fans
twitter business
twitter business marketing jetblue
twitter client rank
twitter client rankings
twitter dashboards
twitter de ashton kustcher
twitter has problems ?
twitter inventor interview
twitter nbc
twitter the jet on tnt
twitter too short
twitter umbrella account
twitterremote -welcome
what is tweetting
whendidyoujointwitter
why people swear

Are you perfectly happy with the way you found/find interesting people to follow on twitter? If so, skip this. Otherwise, read on.

Today, we will interview founder of a twitter crowd sourcing tool: TwindeXX

TwindeXX.com is “Crowd sourcing the best of twitter”. In its own words:”..(it’s) a better way to find useful people to follow, based on endorsements from the crowd and an inherent level of trust.” Launched early last week, it has seen some steady growth. If done right, it will provide a fresh and useful approach to the twitterverse, in addition to existing twitter directories, pure algorithms (MrTweet), search tools, or manual recommendation (twibe etc.). However, I was not too sure about where and how to start after landing on its home page. Hoping to better understand TwindeXX and expect great growth from them, I decided to send a few interview questions. Justyn Howard, the founder of TwindeXX, was kind enough to give me a nice run down for the project. Here it is, hope you will enjoy:

Q: 1. How did you come up with the idea of twindexx?

When I first started using Twitter about 2 months ago, my friend and fellow author @jillkonrath introduced me to another user, @marismith. Mari (who is awesome) had a blog post about other great people to follow on twitter. Mari and I have similar interests and businesses so I started following people based on her recommendation and found them to be excellent resources. They tweeted about things that were interesting to me, and I was smarter and more informed as a result of following them.

I immediately started to see the value of twitter and wanted to find more great people to follow. I started using tools like #followfriday and wefollow.com to try to find other users to follow, but it wasn’t nearly as useful as the recommendations I got from Mari. I wanted a website where other people could suggest people for me to follow based on similar interests, but there weren’t any. Twindexx.com was something we wished existed, so we made it ourselves.

Q: 2. What is the business and technical appeal of twindexx comparing to other follower searching tools. (Is it smarter than Mr. tweet?)

Time will tell what our biggest appeal is to our users, but there are a few key differences between twindexx.com and other search tools/directories. The primary thing missing from other search tools is context. With #followfriday for example, we see thousands of names of people we should follow, but why? What are they good at? Am I even interested in the things they tweet about?

The biggest difference is that our directory is based on topical suggestions from the community. Many of the other twitter directories have some context, but are based on self promotion (users add themselves). 100 people can tell me I should follow them on twitter, but when someone who’s opinion I value says I should follow someone, I listen. Mr. Tweet is another great tool, but I personally wanted a tool based on who my favorite people followed (and why) as opposed to a computerized algorithm.

The other big benefit to Twindexx.com, which isn’t immediately apparent is the idea of like-mindedness. If @johndoe recommends another user who I also find interesting, wouldn’t it be great if I could see who else @johndoe endorses? Chances are they recommend other people I would be interested in, and I’d love to discover them. This will become much more apparent and useful I think as Twindexx.com grows.

This article also explains our thoughts on what our primary benefits are: http://hashtagremix.com/?p=87
And here’s a post about what we wanted to fix about #followfriday: http://hashtagremix.com/?p=119

Q: 3. How long does it take to develop twindexx?

The current version of Twindexx.com took us about a month to develop. We had an earlier version about two weeks after we came up with the idea, but we didn’t think it was ready. The real answer to your question though is that we’re nowhere near done. We’re updating and fixing things every day and continue to build new functionality in the background.

Q: 4. Who do you consider as established and upcoming competitors.

There are a ton of useful tools for finding people on twitter (twazzup, twibes, wefollow, etc.) but we don’t know of anyone who is really taking the crowd-sourced approach to finding people to follow.

Q: 5. Future plans?

We’re working on a lot of things, some we can discuss, others we have to keep private for now Some of the things coming in the near future are oAuth support (no more passwords), shareable groups and a new, fresh interface. We’re also working on ways to make it easier for users to recommend others and will be adding a few other features we think will be useful to our users.

Q: 6. Do you run this app full time with funding or bootstrap?
We are currently “bootstrapped” and operating as a self-funded project, though we may consider taking some angel funding as we develop some of our more aggressive ideas. We’re putting in full time hours at this point, but still juggling with other projects/jobs that bring in the $$ to develop Twindexx.