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The interview is NOT done by me.

I have done quite a few interviews with many inspiring entrepreneurs who work on apps, websites built on twitter platforms, in fact, I collected most of them under the “twitter app founders round table” interview series. Today I will be giving a roundup about the “health” status for all these websites that I have interviewed with, I think 2 or 3 months are a good time period to do a check up. Please note: the apps’ failure (or success) does not necessarily say the same thing about founders, for those who failed, I have same amount of respect, if not more as when I interviewed them. This list is trying to show what works and what does not, simple as that so we can learn from who have pioneered.

Big Winners:
Twazzup.com: I had a very memorable, face to face interview with its co-founder Cyril (@mocy). I never ended up putting the interview on the blog partially because I was afraid to miss important bits. Twazzup has really come a long way and become the best twitter search engine out there. If you have not, be sure to give it a try.

Trazzler.com: the pioneer in the online travel world with real time spin. Highly addictable. See Interview here

Cheaptweet.com: one of the rare apps out there who is profitable and growing fast. See interview here

TwtApps.com: started/ran by an one man team, twtapps.com is a slew of applications bringing utility to your door. Very elegantly designed and is growing very fast. I have no doubts that they are highly profitable. See interview

Tweetree.com: elegance, early mover and utility are the key for this app to have a leg up everyone else in the same field. Be sure to check it out. Interview here.

twitvid.io: first video sharing on twitter. See Interview here.

Useful apps with flat or no growth, but has potential
Tweepz.com
Localtweeps.com
Tweepler.com
TwitterImage.com
Twittermass.com
TwitDoc.com
TwitPub.com
Twittley.com
Twitoaster.com

Trending down with uncertain future
Tweetbrain.com
TwindeXX.com
Twanalyst.com
Tweetfind.com
Stumbletweets.com
MillionDollarFollow.com

People, Help me out on this: is it true that any companies with more than 1 “z” in its name are somewhat successful? I can think of Zazzle, Twazzup.com (best twitter search engine, btw) etc., now we have a relative new comer called Trazzler.com, a travel site with a personal and “twittery” approach. There are many things special about Trazzler.com, mostly hand crafted by users (not just user generated), Trazzler thinks “online travel should inspire” – inspiring us to desire a place to escape to, to disappear into. As to its founder, veteran of the online travel industry Adam Rugel, the first thing I noticed is his twitter username @adam! 30 million twitter users, 155,474 Adams later (search “Adam” on tweepz.com), Adam Rugel can have @adam, like Adam and Eve from garden of Eden, not Adam Carolla, not Adam Saddler, Not twibe’s founder Adam loving. There says a deep link with twitter itself. It turned out there is. Being an accomplished industry veteran, Adam replied to my interview request surprisingly quick, let’s read it through.

1. How did you come up with the idea for trazzler?
I used to work at Odeo with Jack, Biz and Evan. Odeo is the company that preceded Twitter. During a conversation over pistachio nuts in the original Twitter kitchen, Biz suggested a crazy idea involving “virtual teleportation.” It didn’t take Adam long to realize Biz was on to something: Online travel should inspire. Trazzler places you emotionally into specific moments and locales all over the planet and helps you explore the limitless travel opportunities our world has to offer. It started a as Facebook App. (Previously, I worked at AOL Travel in the 90s. I also started a site called 71Miles.com.

2. How is your professional/personal background serving up this venture (your background, your vision for trazzler)?
I have worked in online travel for some time. I’ve also done a lot of traveling with Lonely Planet books and I came to realize that I didn’t really use the whole book… instead, I dog-eared a few pages. Trazzler “trips” are bite-sized… bits of information that we hope more accurately represent the amount of information want about a place.

3. How long did it take you to launch the site. Are you bootstrapping or full blown start up with funding?
We are bootstrapping. Our little teams eats a lot of beans. We also got a $250,000 grant from the fbFund (details: http://blog.trazzler.com/2008_07_23_archive.html).

4. What is the core technology And product strategy behind trazzler? What do you use twitter for?
Trazzler is a website that helps you answer the question, “Where should I go?” by recommending hand-picked trips unique to your location and Travel Personality. We’re developing some sophisticated science on the other side of your screen that will personalize the browsing experience with a lite touch.

We also have a site called Trazzler Buzz — a series of “Best Of” lists created from the volumes of information being transmitted to Twitter every second about 10,000 spots in 50 cities, plus festivals and outdoor destinations all over the world. We rank the list according to a formula that measures volume and recent activity on Twitter. Ultimately, we use Twitter for distribution… we have 32 subaccounts that are targeted geographically (http://www.trazzler.com/twitter). We use Twitter OAuth to help connect people with the right Twitter sub-account to follow.

5. What part/feature sets of trazllar are most heavily used and why?
Folks seem to like to browse trips our site. We average 10 page views per visit which is way above average for travel sites.

6. If there is one thing, what is it that you think will be the key to trazzler’s success?
The uniqueness of the content. We believe three rules that we follow will separate us from other travel sites:
1. Start from the premise that the quality of the content matters.
2. Rely on a combination of free and paid writing.
3. Surface the best writing
We also commit to pay out 15% of our budget to writers, the same as the New York Times.

7. What is the business model?
We will work with hotels, outfitters, OTAs, airlines, and travel agents in a variety of ways.

8. How’s growth prospect for trazzler and what kind of future plans are in the work? Technology, Partnership, product offering, marketing.etc
Our traffic doubled in April then again in May. We’re extremely excited about that. The most exciting product improvement is coming in about two weeks… our algorithm will improve dramatically.

9. Anything else you want to share with the world?
Most of the sophisticated online travel sites are run by MBA types who think about the world of online travel in terms of arbitrage. We want Trazzler to be sophisticated too, but we approach it from a different place and we hope that shows.

Not a big online video watcher, I immediately liked TwitVid.io, who wants to be the twitPic of video sharing on twitter. It’s very easy to use, you upload a video or snap up from webcam, tweet it, done. The online media from big to small immediately went nuts about this new born baby. Few realized how fast it went from an idea to prototype; To feel the energy of the people behind the project, get an idea who are the celebrities using twitVid.io, read on for my interview with TwitVid.io cofounder Chrys Bader, a fellow San Franciscan.

1. How did you come up with the idea for twitVid.io? What is the current vid-sharing landscape on twitter and how would you think twitVid.io is well/better positioned to address than others?

The idea was pretty obvious. I was sitting around with some of my peers and someone asked us why someone hasn’t done TwitVid.io yet. To which I replied, we could do it in 4 days. My friend then challenged us to do it, so we did just that. We started TwitVid.io from scratch on May 11 and launched it on May 15.

I believe we’re ahead of the game because we were first to market and we have had the strongest traction and adoption. Once we launched, competitors followed suit and it’s made it all more interesting and fun.

2. How is your professional/personal background serving up this venture (your background, your vision for twitVid.io)?
TwitVid.io is an extension of our existing video sharing platform called Fliggo (www.fliggo.com). We’ve been working on Fliggo since November 2007 and have garnered a substantial amount of experience in developing video sites. I personally have been a web developer for 10 years and have always been addicted to created websites. Our vision for TwitVid.io is to remain the #1 way to share videos on Twitter and to eventually become one of the largest video sharing sites as Twitter continues to grow rampantly.

3. What is the core technology behind twitVid.io? How long did it take you to launch the site. Are you bootstrapping or full blown start up with funding? Given video sharing could be resource-draining thing, How will you scale twitVid.io before accumulating too much expanses?
TwitVid.io is powered by the Fliggo platform. As I mentioned before, it took us 4 days to launch the site. We are a Y-Combinator funded company and are currently raising a round. TwitVid.io will be moving completely over to AWS in the next month and will relieve our scaling needs.

4. Based on your experiences, who are the people using twitVid.io and what do they say about twitVid.io?
A plethora of people are using TwitVid.io. Anything from a person just saying hello, to first-time video bloggers, to long-time video bloggers, to celebrities and brands. We’ve seen people like MC Hammer, Kevin Rose, iJustine, and Tim Ferriss using our site as well as brands and organizations like Playboy, AAA, Six Flags, the NBA, as well as various other companies. Also popular YouTubers like CharlesTrippy and FAIL TOYS are prominent users of TwitVid.io.

5. If there is one thing, what is it that you think will be the key to twitVid.io’s success?
The key to our success has been and will be our ability to attract and maintain influential users as well as providing an engaging, high quality experience for all of our users. We care deeply about the user experience on TwitVid.io, and the amount of time and passion we put into it is reflected by our strong userbase and evangelist users.

6. What is the business model?
Currently we only run advertising on the site. But we have some exciting plans for monetization that I can’t go in to just yet. We are currently working on a handful of very promising relationships.

7. How’s growth prospect for twitVid.io and what kind of future plans are in the work? Technology, Partnership, product offering, marketing.etc
I keep answering your questions before you ask them We have some exciting partnerships in the works, nothing that I can divulge just yet, but we’re eager to announce them. Our goal is to have a video posted every minute by the end of July, and we’re getting closer every day! Keep an eye out for exciting partnerships and integrations coming in the near future.

8. Anything else you want to share with the world?
I like turtles! Anyway, I just want to share my appreciation to all of our early users who have helped us test and supported our efforts. Our site would be nothing without the users, so much love to everyone who is TwitViding!

You have seen it all, all the interviews filled with buzz words, until this one conducted by Journalist Danny Sullivan, the founder of one of highly regarded blog site: searchengineland.com. The interview covers some extremely important topics such as thoughts on repositioning Twitter, Search Ads, The Twitter Ecosystem & More. I suggest you to take half hour, sit yourself comfortably and absolutely do not take call from your girlfriend during the reading. Ok, let’s read!

Last Thursday, I talked with Twitter cofounder Biz Stone on a variety of issues about Twitter but especially focused around search. In the interview, he discussed: how Twitter may redesign its home page to better reposition itself as a sharing and discovery service; how discovery might be enhanced by perhaps by allowing people to share “groups” of friends with each other; how the Twitter ecosystem of third-party software and services have helped people have “patience” with the service by adding features it couldn’t yet develop; the importance of SMS and more.

The Hotness Of Real Time Search — But What Is It?

All the major players are reported to be talking to Twitter about everything from buying the service to getting its “firehose” datastream of tweets. What types of deals are being discussed? Stone said that it’s all still talk, that no one quite has figured out how they should work together.

Certainly there’s much discussion that “real time” search is hot, with Google’s Larry Page saying last week that Google knows “they have to do it.” But what exactly is real-time search to Twitter? Does that mean just getting Twitter’s information or gathering information from other places where people post immediately?

Stone acknowledges that Twitter is a big part of real-time search, in the sense of helping people find out immediately what’s going on — but he also thinks Twitter’s used for more than that, such as a communication tool between people. And if it’s the biggest fish in the real-time pond, he expects many more will be jumping in.

“I imagine more and more people will be interested in this,” he said.

He also said that the existence of Twitter putting out information so quickly has caused everyone to reconsider what else should go out at real-time speed.

“Twitter has changed the pace or has alerted us that there is a pace at which we can operate in real time. And then, how can everything else follow suit, and do we want everything to follow suit? So like you said, there’s content being uploaded to YouTube right or Flickr right now, there’s tons of stuff being uploaded. That doesn’t mean you necessarily just want everything as it’s coming in. I think there’s still tons of learning to be had here, what’s relevant, when does real-time make sense?,” he said.

The video below has him discussing these points:

Does Real-Time Need A Pause Button

After watching how the mistaken news that the law in California against gay marriage had been overturned spread so quickly on Twitter, I wondered if Stone ever wished he could push a big “pause” button to slow people down or perhaps issue systemwide “Amber Alert” style messages to everyone on Twitter.

Stone said that even before Twitter, rumors could spread quickly just through blogging. But he acknowledged that Twitter can spread information fast and “balloon out,” though rumors can also be put to rest just as quickly. Still, “that doesn’t mean we don’t want to address that in some way” he said.

The video below has him discussing these points, along with the advice that you should take cover in an earthquake first, then Twitter:

A Twitter Genius Button For Discovery?

Where might search go? One key area is to help people discover other people and information that they might not have actively known about.

“I think you can zoom out even more from search. You think of search as a box and a button, but when you think of trends or even an @ reply, those are all exciting queries. Those are all leading to more and more discovering. It just took us long enough to say ‘Here’s search in the web UI.’ There’s a lot more that can be done with Twitter to help people help each other. Right now we have this follow model, but even personally. I’ve been following the same people. Is there a way twitter can show me more interesting stuff? Trends is a rudimentary version of that. OK, everyone’s talking about American Idol. There can be more,” he said.

Of course, Twitter faced criticism when it removed an option allowing people to see replies from those they follow to those they don’t. While Twitter said few used this option, there was plenty of vocal outcry on blogs, from those who found this a great way to discover new people. But those people were having to depend on this due to Twitter’s failure to recommend new people to them more intelligently, he explained.

“Because we don’t actually offer good ways to do that, that was like a hack for people. But I think we could do a better job of serendipity. I agree with that. I wish I could go to Twitter and hit a [iTunes-like] genius playlist button. What information am I not seeing?,” he said.

Friends As Playlists?

Speaking of playlists, Stone also said Twitter’s considering a way that friends could almost be grouped into categories:

“One of the things people have been asking forever for is a way to create lists of accounts, a way to swap lists around,” he said.

He stressed there are no immediate plans for this — it might not even happen. It’s one of many ideas that Twitter is discussing. But it’s an interesting one. In a way, it would turn groups of friends on Twitter into playlists that you could share with others.

For example, I follow a long list of people who are related to search, others who are involved with newspapers and yet others who cover the technology space. Want to follow my search engine people? Get my Twitter “playlist” of people on that topic.

Integrating Keyword Searches Into The Twitter Stream

Early on, Stone said those at Twitter recognized the power of letting people track tweets based on matching keywords, providing an option to get alerts through SMS and instant messaging. “But that’s as far as we got with search,” he said — the company then hooked up with Summize that was doing stuff “light years ahead” of where Twitter was at, leading to the purchase of Summize last July.

Now keyword tracking is fully integrated with Twitter through saved searches, though there’s still an issue to me — matching tweets don’t show in your main Twitter stream. Instead, you have manually click to see the latest results. That doesn’t seem the best experience if Twitter’s trying to promote discovery more fully.

“You’re right. I don’t know where we’re at in terms of the product development, but I agree with you that showing and getting this stuff in front of me, I would like that,” Stone said.

Of course, several Twitter clients can flow matching tweets into a main stream (see How To Track Keyword-Based Tweets Within Your Twitter Stream), which does take some pressure of Twitter having to build this particular feature.

“The the great thing for now is that the people who are really the power users have these things they can go to, but that’s no reason why we shouldn’t figure out better ways to enhance our web experience,” he said.

In the video below, Stone talks further about how the ecosystem around Twitter has reinforced it, noting at one point, “It helped a lot of people keep their patience with us as we took a long time to get ahead of our scaling issues. At least there were other products creating innovative, interesting new UIs for Twitter that kept people happy.”

Old School Twitterer

Talk of clients made me wonder what Stone uses. As it turns out, nothing, at least for when he’s on the web.

“I’m kind of old school. I use Tweetie on the iPhone. I also use Summizer, a dedicated trends tool. If I’m in line at the supermarket, I find myself using it all the time. Other than that, I use SMS and the Twitter.com web site,” he said.

How about others in the Twitter office. Is there any predominant tool or method used?

“It’s all mixed up,” he said, noting the person he sits next to with uses Tweetdeck but all the panels it shows kind of freaks him out. “I think a lot of folks are liking Tweetie around here,” he added.

SMS Is Growing, The Future, Not The Past

Being an iPhone user, it simply never occurs to me to use SMS to access Twitter. But Stone said usage is growing, and that it’s very important.

“For me, SMS is this extra cool thing. It’s not just where we started but it’s also the future. There are 4 billion phones that are Twitter-ready, and Twitter is just as useful on them. That people can use it for access to this real-time network is really inspiring to me,” he said.

The Kogi Korean BBQ taco truck that tweets where it will be in Southern California is a well-known example of Twitter’s real-time network being used by a business, but plenty of others do, such as a bakery in New York that keeps people updated on what’s out of the oven, he said. And SMS can help others do the same.

“Street vendors in India could do it, or places where they aren’t going to have internet access any time soon,” Stone said.

He noted that Twitter struck a deal to bring SMS to Canada a few weeks ago and that overall, “SMS usage is growing like crazy,” especially as more people are getting unlimited SMS packages. Twitter, of course, has also been looking at tapping into some of the SMS fees for revenue, though it doesn’t actually charge users directly for them.

Search Ads “Make Sense”

Last week, a Reuters article quoted Stone saying that the company wasn’t pursuing advertising for a variety of reasons, including that “it’s just not quite as interesting to us” and him noting that “there are no people at Twitter who know anything about advertising or work in advertising.”

That caused many to assume that Twitter either didn’t like ads or wouldn’t do them, which in turn produced an official Twitter blog post saying that Twitter doesn’t hate ads but that taking traditional banners ads is low on the list of ideas.

The reaction to his quote caught Stone by surprise. He’d assumed people understood he was talking about banners.

“People are always asking us, ‘Are you going to put banner ads up?’ We’ve been saying over and over that we’re not going to put those ads on the site. I came to work and saw all these new articles [suggesting Twitter would take no types of ads at all] and said ‘That’s not what I meant. I clarified and said, ‘There’s tons of good opportunity. If you’re on Twitter and looking for something, we’d want to do it in some smart, relevant interesting way.”

So any leading candidates on where ads might go, and how they look?

“The one thing that might make sense are search results pages, but I’m not sure we know exactly yet what that might look at,” Stone said, though stressing there are no immediate plans to ad these.

Twitter Search Versus Integrated Search

Back to search, how have the changes been going? Personally, I find myself constantly going to the dedicated search.twitter.com search page, since until recently, I didn’t have search integrated to my Twitter pages. I also like the cleaner page and bigger search box there. But now that Twitter Search is built into Twitter, are people doing more at Twitter itself?

“We’re still at the beginning of it. People who had been using Twitter use it in a certain way,” Stone said, noting that he has tended to go to Twitter Search himself. “I’d trained myself. But the truth is that there will be more people that join Twitter this year than are on Twitter now. The decisions we make now will have a huge impact going forward.”

Not “What Are You Doing” But “What Do You Want To Find Out?”

This led to Stone’s observation that Twitter’s home page isn’t prepping new users for the service as well as it could, something he hopes may change soon — though he also stressed there’s no set date for this.

“Our front page still says keep up with your friends and family. But Twitter is the place for sharing and discovering right now. I think there’s crazy room for improvement. ‘Welcome to Twitter, what do you want to find out?’,” Stone said.

Indeed, it’s been well noted that plenty of people are turning to Twitter itself, in addition to Twitter Search, to find out information (see How We Search With The Twitter “Help Engine”? for more on this). And that ability to discover things is often the hook that helps people “get” Twitter, rather than the concept that they can Twitter things themselves.

“We had to learn that lesson over again. At Blogger, we used to demo the Blogger UI to people [the control panel to create blog posts and manage blogs]. People wouldn’t get it. Then we thought, ‘Wait a minute, what if we show them blogs first?’ We’d get a reaction like, “Oh, I have a bakery, could I make a blog for that?’,” he said.

Search As Key To Understanding Twitter

With Twitter, it’s the same. People see the Twitter interface and don’t really get it, he said.

“Then you show them search. ‘What do you want to know is going on? What’s your business? What do you do?’ We show them that, and they say whoa, this is crazy. Wait, I disagree with this guy. How do I talk to him?’,” he explained. “We need to reposition the product in a way that’s more relevant to people. That’s just obvious. We’ve focused so much on dealing with the popularity and the technical scaling needed that we didn’t have time for the forehead-slapping part,” he said.

But while Twitter might be repositioned to stress the ability to share and discover, Stone also says it needs not to define itself too much.

“There’s actually a certain awesomeness to not putting too much fidelity on twitter early. To say use it for this is to block out a whole realm of possibilities. We got lucky because we built an API early, and that blossomed into an ecosystem,” he said. “One of those key sentence [of what Twitter is] is that we don’t know. We need to leave in some mystery and the concept of emergence. A big mistake would be to think we’ve figured it all out.”

In the video below, Stone talks more on the subject — better positioning the home page to users and repositioning Twitter as:

• A place to share
• A place to discover
• The “don’t know” mystery aspect
• A platform with an extended ecosystem of tools and services

Finally, after the interview, attention was focused on Louis Gray’s article about problems with Twitter Search — how sometimes tweets are delayed in appearing or won’t appear at all if date-range filters are applied. I asked Stone about the issues, and he replied that Twitter’s aware that problems happen from time to time and is looking at the issues.

“Sub-second indexing is brave new world, and we’re in the trenches inventing it as we go,” he said.

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).

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.