2above.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.

Twitter It!

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

Twitter It!

Today, ReadWriteWeb.com posted a great article about “Twitter Crowns Bit.ly As The King of Short Links; Here’s What It Means”., as they put it simply about the truth about “Bit.ly”, the URL shortening service, is that its not a URL shortener, its a trend management and metrics platform. It says that

“People share links to pages in the following ways: by email, on Facebook, on Twitter and through countless other methods. The company that does the best job analyzing that sharing activity and creating a compelling user experience based on it is likely to become a very big deal”

It further concludes:

We don’t want to argue that Bit.ly is the next Google, but the technology it’s brought to market could be very important in the indexing of the social web.

Pulling out Google card got me thinking, thinking hard and way back to pre-Google era, and how searches/indexing/analyzing social web could possibly introduce another Google to the world. Following is what I was thinking out loud, and posted as comment to ReadWriteWeb’s blog post (too long, I know). I hope it can speak to the average Joe.

Let me think out loud: before Google, we searched the web and never could find the relevant website for the keywords. Google came out combing through it with page-rank (algorithms involving huge linear/non linear algebra metrics), then the web became an orderly place when we came to Google’s site.

Now imagine the social web, to simplify the matter, imagine social web being only twitter (which is a good assumption), is it a place with order? Are we frustrated that we can’t seem to find the right…hm…tweets with the right link pointing to the website linked upon by social web? For example, Maybe I am looking for the right tweets pointing me the right resources about Portland since I am about to visit (not really) there, search.twitter.com does not rank the resulting tweets on its search page so I have no way to know which one is a good tweet, maybe with a resourceful link. With Tweepz.com, search results show people with “Portland” in their profile, and you can filter the results in a variety of ways, such as # of followers, join dates etc., but it’s not enough, the filter is too minimal, I still can not find the right people/tweets/links. So let’s try twazzup.com, which is much more advanced as it pulls up most recent tweets with “visit portland” along with “top tweets”, “most popular links”, although I have no idea how they are placed/indexed/sorted. Nevertheless twazzup is one step closer to ideal results about “visit Portland”

With a super smart Bit.Ly, tons of data can be pulled out through its API, service like search.twitter.com or Twazzup could aggregate that “link” data, slice/dice it and present along with the search results which will be better than currently served, which also makes me think: would URL shortening service become the engine of next “social web page ranker”? Or will search engines such as search.twitter.com, twazzup, or tweepz (if they catch on soon) be the driving force? Maybe a solution completely new will emerge, or maybe one will acquire another to form a joint force to present an ultimate “social web Page ranking machine”, and that machine will be key to finding the right information.

So, would the next big player be Bit.Ly, or someone else combining the analysis seen on bit.ly, along with semantic analysis of the tweets?

I hope I am making sense for you of this social web search phenomenon, and through which we will understand where to focus our energy.

Twitter It!

A week has just gone by, let’s take a quick look at who are the upcoming stars in the twitter apps’ world.

Tweepz.com:

a twitter people (tweeps) search engine which has indexed more than 3million users. Twitter has not made it easy to find people. Existing solutions such as twellow/justtweetit provides yellow page like direcotry. Tweepz, on the other hand, searches through the user profiles for the queries, then display the results in a very clean way that you can easily sort by variety of parameters. I especially like the “refine your search” feature, which similar to Nextag’s comparison shopping engine, making it very easy to slice and dice the search results. I wish I could find more information about their advanced search features. Nevertheless, simplicity and elegant solution will probably make this one a winner.

Tweetree.com:

Ever wonder what your friends replies you about? (I do, all the time, since Twitter does not show the source of conversation). Tweetree puts your Twitter stream in a tree so you can see the posts people are replying to in context. It also pulls in lots of external content like twitpic photos, youtube videos and more, so that you can see them right in your stream without having to click through every link your friends post.

Twitfave.com:

it looks at twitter users favourites to tell you about the most interesting tweets and who favourited your tweets! Idea is very simple, and solution is useful. I can see there are more applications and even commercial use for the “favorite” data that it collects over the time.

twibes.com

twibes’ founder Adam built Twibes so he could recommend my friends, and of course so they could recommend him for other tweeps to follow. Finding followers is a big area within twitter app world and we have seen many approaches. What I like about twibes is it’s really simple, you pick your friends from your followers tapestry and recommend them. Twibes then shows you (in real time, lot of machine time, long wait) the top tweeps with the most recommendations. I am not a huge fan for its “group” feature which does not seem to be picked up by users as well.

bakertweet.com:
Twitter has grown into mainstream and many small businesses are finding interesting ways using twitter to communicate with “the world”, bakertweet.com is a perfect, creative example.
bakertweet.com is a way for busy bakers to tell the world that something hot and fresh has just come out of the oven. It’s as simple as turning the dial and hitting the button. All of the baker’s followers get a Twitter alert to tell them that it’s bun-time. Or bread time. Or whatever

Sit tight, you will like this intro:

BakerTweet from POKE on Vimeo.

Twitter It!