2above.com

When there are more than a dozen companies working on same or similar stuff, it’s hard to stand out. Tweetree.com’s success so far, has a lot to do with its early move advantage, its sophisticated yet simplistic product design approach, for those who are familiar with Troy Thompson (@troynt)’s grease monkey twitter script, Tweetree does everything prettier in its own website, and people seem to love it. Costa Walcott, main guy behind Tweetree, took his precious time to answer some of my questions. Let’s enjoy the interview together:

1. How did you come up with the idea for TweeTree.com? What is your vision for Tweetree.com?
When using Twitter, we found that the experience was hampered by a lot of extra “clicking” in order to get context for your stream. Most @replies make little sense without having to click “in reply to”, and most links are shortened, so you usually have to click through each of them in order to understand what’s being shared.

Tweetree follows conversations and displays both sides of an @reply automatically, and also follows all links and embeds any relevant information below the tweet. So things like twitpics, YouTube videos, and songs are embedded directly below the tweet without having to click through any links.

2. How does your background serve up this venture?
My company, Draconis Software, develops and hosts Tweetree. We have a lot of experience in web development, and personally are very interested in social media.

3. How long did it take you to bring the idea to launch? Are you are a startup with funding or bootstrapping?
The process of building Tweetree was surprisingly quick. I think we went from idea to launch in under a month. Draconis is funding Tweetree ourselves.

4. What is your business model? Are you profitable?
Currently we’re not making any revenue from Tweetree, but we’d be open to advertising opportunities if they could add to the user experience.

5. If there is one thing what is it that you think critical to tweetree?
I think the most important part of Tweetree is context we provide around links. Twitter may have started as a way to answer “what are you doing?”, but I find more and more people are using Twitter as a way to read and share pages. When somebody links to a YouTube video in Twitter, it’s much more valuable to be able to see the video directly below the tweet, rather than having to click open a new page.

6. What is the future growth plan for the venture? Any ideas to fend off competitions (who are they?)
Moving forward we’d like to keep adding features that make Tweetree the best possible web interface for Twitter. There are a lot of excellent desktop and mobile Twitter clients, but other than Tweetree the only web client is pretty much twitter.com itself, which ironically isn’t a particularly great Twitter client.

7. Any tips, things that you can share with individuals, brands, businesses using twitter?
I think it’s important not only to have a presence on Twitter, but to provide valuable information to your followers, whether this comes from sharing links, replying to users, or (ideally) a combination of the two. Most companies won’t have much success on Twitter if they only use it to promote themselves.

8. Any thing else you want to share with the world?
Give Tweetree a try if you’re looking to improve your Twitter experience!

Who does not like pretty colors, who does not like pretty designs? Who does not want a prettier twitter background? If that is you (why wouldn’t it be?), then read on for our interview with the colorful, yet a straightforward man behind TwitterImage.com.

Huge Briss, the designer/founder behind profitable twitterimage.com answered my interview Qs with his swift style, everything is to the point. New entrepreneurs will for sure learn from this concise yet insightful interview. As he puts it in a business manner: “Finding ways to turn clients into evangelists”

What is Twitter Image? How did you come up with the idea?
I created TwitterImage.com to specifically market custom Twitter background designs although we also design backgrounds for YouTube channels and MySpace.

It wasn’t really an idea that needed coming up with, it’s was more of a no-brainer. Twitter allows members to upload custom background images and for anyone that uses their account to market anything it provides a perfect opportunity to make a statement about themselves or their company and further their brand.

How long did it take you to bring the idea to launch? Are you are a startup with funding or bootstrapping?
I registered the domain name in the morning and had the first rough site up by the end of the day. The business is simply one of several design related services my company provides so it doesn’t really require any additional funding.

I see many top/celebrity use Twitter Image, how did you convince them to use? What is your marketing strategy?
I haven’t had to convince anyone, I simply asked several of the high profile Twitter users if they’d like a custom background if they didn’t have to pay for it. No one turned that offer down. If helps that I knew many of them already too, I guess.

Doing that allowed me to add several backgrounds to my new portfolio and gained me quite a bit of early exposure. Since then I’ve stopped offering free custom backgrounds and the business has continued to grow primarily by word of mouth, although I do pay to advertise on some websites. For the most part, every new background we produce becomes more advertising for us. I’ve always been a big believer in finding ways to turn clients into evangelists.

What is your business model? Are you profitable?
My last answer pretty much laid out my business model and yes, we’re profitable.

If there is one thing what is it that you think critical to Twitter Image’s success so far?
I guess I’d have to say my passion for the medium. I’m a huge proponent of social networking and Twitter in particular. Using social networking to promote my own business gives me insights other designers won’t have.

What is the future growth plan for the venture?
That will depend entirely on Twitter’s growth. Twitter is a phenomenon and is changing the way most of us use the Internet. Real-time search is a perfect example of just one of those things. Twitter will continue to grow and evolve and as long as they continue to encourage members to customize their backgrounds Twitter Image will be here to provide them.

Any tips, things that you can share with brands, businesses using twitter?
The biggest mistake I see most companies making is using their Twitter account as nothing more than an RSS feed. No one wants to follow a company that simply uses their profile to hawk their wares or post mundane tweets, they want to know that a real person and not a bot is talking to them.

Twittley.com is like digg for twitter, Enough said! The traffic has been pretty decent and is picking up in a big way recently. I got hold of Goran, the developer behind Twittley. While English is NOT his first language, Goran managed to pull off some classic quotes, unintentionally.
Quote 1: One day while I was surfing the net, I found Twitter.
Quote 2: I worked pretty hard (5 hours a day)
Quote 3: Well there are no real competitors
Quote 4: Currently Twittley doesn’t make money and I am not sure when it will.

Well, that for sure gets your appetite going. Let’s read the whole interviews Q/A.

1. What is Twittley? What is your vision for twittley?
Twittley is first Twitter social news website made for people to discover and share content through Twitter network, by submitting links and stories, and voting and commenting on submitted links and stories.

Well, I want Twittley to become the biggest and the best application for Twitter. It sure has lots of possibilities and it’s a matter of time.

2. How did you come up with the idea (love to hear your background info, inspiration etc. leading to the launch of the project), how does your personal background serve up this venture?
One day while I was surfing the net, I found Twitter. Lots of people talked about it as a great traffic source. After i tried it I was really impressed. I’ve found out that Twitter has Api and started to play with it. First I’ve created a script which showed what Twitter users think about something (I used it for some software repository site).I worked on that few hours, and liked Twitter API immediately. I wanted to find a way to better use Twitter traffic and I found it. Twittley is one of the best ways to get Twitter traffic to your site.

3. How long did it take to launch the app from idea to app? Are you a full blown start-up with funding or bootstrapping?
I worked pretty hard (5 hours a day) and it took me around 1 week to build everything. Currently I can’t find any sponsors and I’m working “pro bono”. On the site there are no ads and it won’t be at least for next few months. I’ve started this project with 20$ (domain + hosting) plus lots of my free time.

4. Do you have other favorite “competitors” if any?
Well there are no real competitors. Others just track twitter links and that’s all. There is no site which has even 30% of our functions. Not only that we track twitter links, we create twitter links (we’re something like Digg/Reddit for Twitter), we allow users to vote, we have algorithms for tracking quality of votes plus awesome button for every site(button is better than the one you have on your site ).

5. How is the adoption since launch? Who are the most active people using your service and what your target audiences are?
Currently there are just 2000-3000 users and traffic for now is pretty small. Currently site on front page gets around 300-500 visits (targeted twitter + twittley). My targeted audiences are all twitter users who like web 2.0 and social bookmarking.

6. How do you make money?
Currently Twittley doesn’t make money and i’m not sure when it will. We’re looking for sponsors but without any luck for now.

7. If there is one thing what it is that is critical to Twittley’s success?
Hm… I think hard work, constantly adding new function and listening what users want (I get lots of requests on my mail and create 90% of those functions)

8. Future growth plan? Technology, business partnership etc.
We will add lots of new functions(soon firefox extension(within a week or two),ability to follow someone and get friends on twittley).

This past week has seen some high quality twitter apps with disruptive potential. Among 30 new twitter apps I discovered this week, I have chose the best ones as below. Let’s dive right into it.

Twitvid.io

Powered by Fliggo, twitvid.io is not shy about its intention: to be the twitPic of video on twitter. In its founders’ words:”The years have taught us that there is no better way to improve something than to simplify.” and the goal of twitvid.io is “reduce the number of steps between creating video and sharing”.

Chirpio

Chirpio lets you recommend people you follow by voting for them. The votes get aggregated for that user for the overall rating ranking board. As of the writing of this post, top people are @mashable @techcrunch with 90+ votes. A great thing I like about Chirpio is it lets me vote people as I see their tweets. It’s more real time than twibe.com in that sense. I can follow/unfollow people on chirpio as well. Chirpio access twitter profile through Oauth.

TwtbizCard

A brand new product from TwtApps (we had an interview with the founder Felipe), twtbizcard lets you say goodbye to business cards as you know it and send a Twitter Business Card looking like this
. Just launched, it has seen exponential growth. People just love it!

FoodFeed

Developed by a 21 yr old, FoodFeed is a service that helps you share your eating habits with everyone; It asks you to tweet like “@having pizza”, then aggregate all the tweets mentions @having”. Quite smart solution in a vertical with huge potential. And the design is no joke as well.

BoilingPage

BoilingPage is the real-time search engine where you will find the most recently popular web pages; when you search for a topic in Boilingpage, you will find real-time popular webpages as results including links found on twitter.

SocialMention

SocialMention wants it all: it is a social media search platform that aggregates user generated content from across the universe into a single stream of information. It allows you to easily track what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web’s social media landscape in real-time. Social Mention monitors 80+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc. Business model wise, it also provides a point-in-time social media search and analysis service, daily social media alerts, and a third-party API.

TataTweet

Developed by @tipJoy, the first twitter payment service, Tatatweet serves as an experimental service project to charging additional service using tipJoy: essentially, Tatatweet is a simple tool to take a group of twitter accounts, and feed them into a single account, for a fee, which is then transacted through TipJoy. Simple concept, exponential growth in its first week.

I started twitter account 2 years ago, thought it was brilliant because it captures one of the nature of human: laziness. Typing into a few words on twitter not only record my life/thoughts in a quick way, it also immediately get my voices out there. It’s a quick way to create a personal diary without much effort.

1. How I started to gain followers
Only 3 months ago I started using twitter more actively to advocate TRX suspension training (@TRX_Fitness) because I had become of fan for it. In order to connect with fitness minded people, I did the unthinkable: mass followed about 500 people with keywords “fitness” in their profile using some tools. Almost 70% of these people followed me back, within a few days I got a few hundred followers.

but Things have changed.

2. The shift of interest, hence, tweets, hence, everything
As I developed deeper interest and knowledge about twitter, connecting with entrepreneurial bug deep within, my tweets have changed. I realized although twitter has become BIG, it has NOT yet started its new economy like Google did back in 2001/2002, and twitter WILL create a whole new economy pretty soon. This is THE opportunity that I am deeply passionate about and don’t want to lose on. I immediately stopped tweeting about fitness, taking down my profile photo with bare naked six-packs (of mine), changed my twitter username to @theReviewGuy, started tweeting more about twitter eco system; Of course, my goofy personality always shoot out a few daily mundane tweets from time to time, along with my profile pic;

3. The decline of # of followers
I immediately noticed followers started to bail out, a dozen after another. That hurt my ego. Nevertheless, it is understandable. These followers are mostly interested in fitness, hence their tweets/interest are fitness related. Once my tweets are about social media, twitter, they were like: WTF and hit the highway. At the mean time, I am also bored by the tweets about how many push ups people are doing everyday. I want to find out knowledgeable people, developers, business owners, entrepreneurs to connect with, see their thoughts, opens up my own horizon. I immediately went to the action to remove people I follow in hundreds. As the results, my # of followers continue to decline.

4. The rise of # of relevant followers
I found the best way to find people that I am interested to follow, is to find it on your own through “referral”. How can you ever have time to do that? Well, I cheated – I started out by identifying a few high profile people with deep knowledge about twitter and technology, using an auto follower tools to follow the top people they follow. Just imagine this, if you are twitter founder Ev, who would you follow? Of course people he respects. This way I created a pool of people that MAY interest me.

5. STOP adding people in mass
Once I started following these brand new people, I stopped adding more people in mass. I decided to see if their tweets are indeed interesting to me. In a week or so, I continued removing people that tweeted irrelevant stuff, and adding more people one at a time through referrals, @mentions etc. Since this is an ongoing process, over the time I have subscribed to many interesting people that helped broadening my horizon, learning new things, acquiring more knowledge. Of course, I always keep a few amusing people in my pool since they make me smile and appreciate daily average life.

6. Start to communicate, the # of followers will increase
Twitter really is a real time story sharing tool. People started to find my tweet/blog entry interesting, and first time in a long time, # of my followers continue to grow organically. Using Grease monkey’s firefox add on tool, I was able to examine new followers and add them immediately to groups, such as “twitter app founders”, “business owners” etc. The best of all is that 95% of the time the communication is two way. Take this blog for example, twitter app founders I approached have been extremely open and willing to share their in depth start up stories. Hence it created my own “twitter app founder round table series” interview – which gathered quite a lot of attention and more followers. At the same time, I continued to lose “fitness” people.

7. “40 days later, 1800+ followers, steady traffic to my blog, and more interesting stories”
Yes, that is where I stand now. Twitter has shown me a new way to gain knowledge, share stories with wildly interesting people. I had the opportunity to talk/meet with exciting founders/developers/business owners, the experience/knowledge gained from such interaction worth a MBA degree from top business school. And really, twitter is not about # of followers. It’s about keeping it interesting to yourself. Everything else will follow.

A “quiet” tweet from @marshallk (VP of ReadWriteWeb) a few weeks ago introduced me to the world of tweepz.com, a twitter people search engine with good number of indexed tweeps, efficient filter, easy to follow UI. Developed by a dutch based developer named Jochem Prins from Exalead, tweepz has the potential to be the best people search engine in the twitter universe. You have to see my interview with Jochem to see through that. It’s really a powerful tool with great future.

1. What is the tweepz.com? What is your vision behind it? What is the goal of tweepz.com? Can you explain a bit about the real time search’s landscape and how tweepz will prosper?
Tweepz is a people search engine which helps you find and discover people on twitter. We found it kind if difficult to look for people who might be interesting to follow (using the tools provided by twitter). The aim of Tweepz is to make this a lot easier and maybe even fun to do. The power of Tweepz is that it enables you to find people by their biography, location and name. This can be of help when you are looking for people to follow from a specific company, with a specific hobby or expertise etc.

As tweepz searches through the profiles of people and not particularly through the status updates, the real-time aspect is less important here. What we do think is that the authority or trust people have in the community will become an important aspect in real-time search (as pagerank is in websearch). Tweepz could play a role here by indicating who is a high ranked tweep on a specific subject.

2. How did you come up with the idea? How’s your past background serve up this venture?
The idea arised simply because we had problems ourselves while finding new people on twitter. As our company (Exalead) develops search technology we decided to develop a solution for this.

3. How long did it take to bring idea to launch? Are you a full blown start up with funding or bootstrapping?
Not long Exalead’s platform is very agile so the main effort was to setup the crawling. The site went online only two weeks after we started the development.

4. How’s user adoption so far since launch (when)?
We soft-launched by the end of March 2009, the first publication about tweepz was early april after which the usage started growing. We are pretty happy with the adaption so far and receive a lot of valuable feedback. Nevertheless, given the huge twitter community we can always do better

5. Tweepz has a nice filter system built in that I like, however it only searches people’s profile. Is that your focus?
Yes, the profile’s are our focus. We do plan to start indexing people’s homepage and take into account which subjects people tweet about. But the aim is to be a people search engine.

6. How do you compare to other twitter search engines, especially twazzup.com?
The main difference is that Twazzup searches within status updates and Tweepz within profiles. I guess both services can very well be used next to each other or maybe even integrated based on API’s.

7. What is the business models for tweepz.com, are you profitable?
Making money is not our goal at the moment. Costs are relatively low and we rather focus on offering a valuable application. We can imagine to offer ‘featured users’ spots in the future, or maybe offer premium services for corporate use (for example for recruiters).

8. If there is one thing What it is that is critical to tweepz.com’s success?
First of all, people will have to be aware that we exist. Next to that, we believe that we should provide an open platform so that’s why we are working hard on providing a Tweepz API. This API will for example make it possible to integrate Tweepz in twitter clients like Tweetdeck and Seesmic or in other mashup-based applications like twazzup.

9. Future plans? Technology, business partnership, products etc.?
I think I already mentioned a couple, but these are things which are on the roadmap:
- provide an API
- start indexing people’s homepage
- provide personal recommendations for people you might like to follow
- OAuth for a better integration with twitter
- Improve our coverage: index more people on twitter and possibly other social platforms

To be 100% honest, I was a bit confused by tweetFind.com. Its name suggests search engine for twitter, but it’s actually a twitter directory. However it does not just do directory, there are bunch of other things going on at the same time… So I thought: there are tons of alternative solutions every direction I look, why spending time to “figure out”?

While keeping TweetFind.com on the back of my mind, I also noticed it’s picking up some momentum lately, especially after they added “live stream” feature to directory selected. Interesting! So I thought maybe there are great hidden value that I just did not get? It’s about the time to approach tweetFind.com founder Ruben Orozco, let him tell the real story behind this up and coming venture. As always, I asked him about his business model and if tweetfind is profitable. Be sure to read to the end.

1. What is the goals of TweetFind?
One of the main goals of Tweetfind is to contribute to the growth of Twitter and to be one of the main Online Twitter Directories.

2. Is it a directory of people, or search engines of some sort?
Its actually both, its both a Online Directory with a built in Search engine. Its for all Twitter Businesses and Twitter users to search and view. They can also Add their Twitter Profile.

3. At a very high level, how do you differentiate from other popular directories?
TweetFind tries to differentiate from other Twitter Directories in that I strive to give visitors unique features on the site. For instance, this week we added a new “Live Streaming Feature” to our Directories and Categories. If you visit a Category in TweetFind like Santa Barbara, you can click on the Stream button and a Live Twitter Stream will appear showing all of the Live Twitter Conversations that are currently happening about Santa Barbara. You can also use this Live feature on all of the Listings.

4. How did you come up with the idea?
My cousins Merrick and Mario own Prleap.com, and they invited me to a convention in Las Vegas called PubCon last November. It was there that I was introduced to Twitter. I also started to add new Twitters that I talked to at Pubcon like @Chiropractic, @blafrance, @kid_disco, and @ItsDUHnise. Finding new interesting people to follow is fun. I also attended a fun Poker Tournament hosted by DK(@purposeinc). Once I started to add people that I talked to I started to follow famous bloggers to give me more insight like @Shoemoney,@neilpatel and @JohnChow. It was around that time that I asked myself it would be great to have a directory of Twitter users, so that anyone can easily find cool new Twitters to Follow and Add their Twitter Profiles to a Twitter Directory.

5. How’s your past background serve up this venture?
Its helped in that I’m very familiar with technology. I have owned my own computer repair company in the past, created numerous websites and past 5 years have also been doing affiliate marketing.

6. How long did it take to bring each sub-idea to launch?
It took me a few days to come up with the name, logo, web template and colors. It took me a few weeks to create the website and the last few months I have been adding features to TweetFind.

7. Are you a full blown start up with funding or bootstrapping?
I operate TweetFind by myself.

8. How’s user adoption so far?
User adoption so far has been great. Thousands of Twitter Profiles have been submitted into our directory. I have also added more features that users have suggested.

9. What is the business models for tweetfind, are you profitable.
I’m currently working on future Premium Paid features for Tweetfind. I plan to be profitable in the coming months.

10. If there is one thing What is it that is critical to tweetfind’s modest success?
TweetFind will always strive to be a interesting, fun and easy to navigate Twitter Directory.

Stumpletweets.com is a little website “crawling” twitter for the tweets with “link” in it in the last 6 hours, to keep it “real time”. When you enter a phrase, stumbletweets will show you the web page embedded in the “stumbled” tweet, with the actual tweet on top of it. Depending on how stumbletweets determines which tweet to show, it can actually get very interesting. The developer behind it is Max Lee @zedomaxbiz who is also behind a variety of websites such as http://zedomax.biz, a “blog search engine for internet marketing”. See below for my interview with him; I have a feeling that Max is a typical California kid, a laid back, carefree entrepreneur, although I have no idea how he assumes I hate programming, LOL. If you are ready to become an entrepreneur, this one is for you, get ready for some exciting nights with RedBulls;)

1. What is the stumbletweets.com? How do you decide which tweets with links to show? What is your vision behind it?

StumbleTweets.com is basically a website that will let you stumble interesting tweets in real-time. The tweets with links are randomly selected within the last 6 hours, we don’t go beyond that since it’s supposed to be “real-time”. I have to emphasize, “real-time” here because you will only get tweets links if tweepers are twittering about it “right now”, the whole purpose behind twitter.

My vision is that StumbleTweets.com will become more popular among Tweeples as it’s a free service and can only help people browse websites other Twitters are recommending to each other faster.

You can also read about it on Mashable, we just got featured last night:

2. How did you come up with the idea? How’s your past background serve up this venture?
I have done a similar social networking site called http://sitehoppin.com that allows users to “hop” different sites, also probably the only other competition to the more popular http://StumbleUpon.com.
With that experience, I decided to jump on the Twitter wagon and create a Twitter stumbling site from scratch.
But really, I am a pro-blogger, I usually blog over at http://zedomax.com about how-to articles and gadgets. I hate coding as much as you do, I only do it because no one else has done this type of “stumbling” project for Twitter yet.

3. How long did it take to bring idea to launch? Are you a full blown start up with funding or bootstrapping?
I had the idea on Monday, registered domain couple hours later, and the site was ready on Friday after taking massive doses of redbull and no sleep. It doesn’t usually take long for me to launch websites because I do everything from design, programming, and whatnot. Of course, I am sure it would cost at least $$$ if you outsourced everything.

4. How’s user adoption so far since launch (when)?
It’s hard to tell how many users are using the service, I did not implement coding for that yet but traffic levels have been pretty good, about 1000 uniques per day and it’s been less than a month. I (hope) expect to reach 5,000 uniques by end of next month, if that happens, we are doing good, otherwise, I might have to “dump” the site.

5. What is the business models for stumbletweets.com, are you profitable?
This is probably the hardest part, there’s no business model for stumbletweets.com, I really just made it for fun not profit. Of course, I am sure they will be a way to make money once you can get such a service popular first, I never think the other way around. Money will follow. Just look at Twitter if you don’t believe me, they haven’t made a dime yet, but they could make billions once they start putting some ads.

6. If there is one thing What will it be that is critical to stumbletweet’s success?
Basically popularity will rule success. The more people use StumbleTweets and the more traffic the site gets, the higher chance of success.
Anything above 100K unique visitors per day would be so-called “success” or my goal.

7. Future plans? Technology, business partnership, products etc.?
For the long run, I am working on a StumbleTweets API that will allow others to make toolbars/desktop apps/iPhone apps so tweepers can “stumble” on their favorite device. I have also just finished coding a Firefox toolbar over here http://stumbletweets.com/toolbar. I can do the Firefox toolbar but there’s so many other browser platforms out there and I can’t simply do them all myself.

As for business partnerships, I am trying to get Guy Kawasaki (@guykawasaki) to be involved, he might be a good evangelist for such a site. I’ve been a fan of Guy since reading his “Drive Competition Crazy” like 20 years ago. Of course, I am open to any others too, if anyone wants to invest money, programming, or design, you should e-mail me at zedomax [at] gmail.com.

In the way-future, if I could partner with Twitter team directly, I could probably create a better site by making use of their raw Twitter database, right now I am only limited by the Twitter API.

Well, that’s about it. StumbleTweets is just a site that can help you browse sites that other twitters are twittering about in real-time. If you like it, it will make you happy by saving you a bunch of time searching for stuff.

Thanks for taking interest in our new venture grant, best wishes to your online ventures too!

Verdict was out, for now. Twitter sees tools, not ads, for revenue.

Many people argue that twitter is or will become a dominant real time search engines. Given Google’s success with search engine ads, it should be easy for twitter to simply replicate Google’s model, putting Bid based ads up along with live stream of tweets on search.twitter.com. Why bother to create “intangible”, “premium” tools?

Twitter has One Solid Reason not to quickly jump into pure Ad-supported business model: people behavior, simply put, how people search. Let’s take a good look at how people use search on Google and twitter.

Majority people search Google to find information they don’t know, because Google gives relevant web results to our immediate needs for information. Businesses find it enticing to show their ads with highly relevant Google search results (links). Google then makes money by charging businesses for showing ads along side with these relevant results. Google was born a utility tool for consumers (as opposed to businesses). Ad model and Google make a perfect couple.

Twitter is different.
Majority people come to twitter to share the information, NOT search We tweet about things we are doing, news we just heard of, thoughts bugging us etc…Most of the time we do not search twitter. While search is the ONLY thing we do on Google.com. Who search on twitter? Businesses. Not consumers. Over and over again, we have seen businesses use twitter to FIND consumers followers on twitter, expand customer base, facilitate communication, spread words, compliment customer service etc. Improved Twitter’s search will play a crucial role for businesses to do that by presenting relevant consumers to businesses in search results. The alternative (for businesses to grow on twitter) is for twitter to present businesses in front of consumers when consumers tweet or search. However, showing ads in tweet stream is intrusive, because people are here to share, not search (like Google). Showing ads in twitter search results are not scalable, because majority people spend majority of their time on twitter to share, tweet, NOT search. Therefore, businesses will not benefit from paid ad from twitter as much as they do from Google.

To summarize:
- Consumers search on Google, hence business ads makes sense for Google
- Consumers tweet and social on twitter, hence ad model does not make sense.

As previously mentioned, Businesses find twitter incredibly useful due to its intimate, real time relationship with consumers/customers. However, businesses also have experienced tremendous difficulty to effectively increase their circle of influence on twitter due to lack of tools. This is where twitter can step in and excel:
- Build a kick ass real time search for businesses to proactively reach out to consumers
- Build kick ass “circle of influence” tools to make it easy for businesses to track, measure, manage their follower base and communication stats.

Twitter founders may not have thought this process like written here, but their gut feeling and access to real time data have already guided them to the right track: a business model built on tools to facilitate communication. After all, twitter is the ultimate social sharing utility.

The questions left to ask is: what does this mean for twitter eco-systems? I have some thoughts to share in the future.

Hotel/Resort Lake Placid, published a LONG comment to a great article about how businesses benefit from twitter.com, which I shall re-post in the near future. Take a look at how this resort takes advantage of social medias.

We are a Hotel and Resort in Lake Placid, NY that began a Twitter and Facebook Specific promotion on 4/22.

In brief – The Adirondack High Peaks is not only the name given to 46 mountain peaks over 4000ft in the 6 million acre Adirondack Park of New York but they are also the namesake of our hotel-the High Peaks Resort.

For 46 straight days we are offering a special rate for 46 minutes each day based off the elevation of one of the 46 High Peaks. For example a rate based off the 4867 foot elevation of Whiteface Mountain will be $48.67.

Each day between 9 and 5 we alert friends, fans and followers only through our Twitter Profile and Facebook Page to when the daily rate will be available. After the update is posted the “elevated” rate of the day becomes bookable for 46 minutes on our website.

In the first 26 days of the promotion we’ve gained 550 new Facebook fans, 350 new Twitter followers and have averaged just over 12 reservations and 25 room nights per day.

But more, we’ve experienced such positive feedback from guests grateful for a chance to have a getaway at a time when they thought they just couldn’t afford it.

The promotion has helped us educate others about the High Peaks region around Lake Placid, establish why we are named the High Peaks Resort, give folks a chance to getaway to Lake Placid and to stay at our resort, but most importantly it creating impressions and relationships with guests that will hopefully last a lifetime.

I can’t think of another platform other than Twitter and Facebook that this would have been as successful for us!