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!