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!

Launched about May 1st, 2009 (only 11 days ago), TwitDoc is quickly getting attention from people all over the world, thanks to its first mover advantage in the twitter document-sharing space, its intuitive user experiences, TechCrunch’s positive report, and of course, the mother-ship of real time sharing: twitter.

We have seen over and over again that the derivative tools like twitDoc built on top of giants like twitter and Scribd are able to lead innovation one step ahead of giants themselves, see through the noises and keep the focus sharp. TwitDoc seems to aim at long term, sustainable value. Who are the masterminds behind it, what are the similarities between them and the master chess players who have the ability to anticipate all scenarios, keep focus, remain patient and ready to attack at all times? With all these questions, I “rang up” Bob Brinker out of Littleton, Colorado, determined to put him on the spot. Here it is, let’s “watch” what CEO/Founder of TwitDoc has to say:

1. How did you come up with the idea (a bit background information). Explain what twitdoc.com is; What is the current doc-sharing status on twitter, What is your vision for twitDoc?

Bob: I am an avid twitter user. In my world of finance, I create and see a lot of material in doc/xls form. I needed an easy way to share the info rather than doing the manual steps myself. for this reason, I wanted to create twitdoc. TwitDoc does 3 things in 1 EASY step: 1) upload a document 2) shorten the URL pointing to the document 3) post a ‘tweet’ with the shortened URL at the end. Other file sharing services I found are not twitter-centric. They open pages that ask you to download the document or require more clicking. I just want the tweet to open a ‘viewer’ of the files. This is why we upload to scribd. They handle quick/fast document viewing as well as anyone and their ipaper technology works well. There are lots of additions we can and will make to TwitDoc – but the central idea will always remain this: the EASY way to share documents on twitter.

2. How is your professional/personal background serving up this venture?
Bob: Mike and I have worked in technology in a variety of roles from coder to project mgr for more than 25 years combined. More recently, I have worked in the finance and publishing industry. Twitter is thriving in this field and changing the way we share information among our networks. Mike is the technology lead and I focus on business development and making sure we stick to specific vision for the product. I am already amazed at how many different ways people are using TwitDoc – sharing real estate, art, writing, PR/news, etc. we want to keep it open and let users drive how it is used. We’ll focus on keeping it simple to use and handling more and more types of files.

3. What is the core technology behind twitdoc? how long did it take you to launch the site. Are you bootstrapping or full blown start up with funding? How will it scale?
Bob: For starters, We are linux/php/my sql. It was a rapid development effort of less than one month once the coding began. Mike is a very skilled technologist and has done a great job getting it done quickly and in a manner that will scale easily. We should be able to scale rapidly since we rely on other services for document conversion/storage. We do not want to reinvent other sites that do a good job of document management. We want to be the pipeline for routing documents and files thru twitter smartly and focus on being the onramp onto twitter for sharing documents. We are bootstrapping for now – but we will likely switch to angel/vc funding in the near future – unless we are acquired.

4. It’s still early, but based on your experiences, who would be the people who actually use twitdoc? Are they mainly scribd userbase?

Bob: Our users all over the world both geographically and by subject matter – but here are some real examples:
- Conferences / small group meetings / agendas
- Thesis / publication / math teacher / researcher / literature professor
- People selling stuff, financial advice, antique book dealer, gardening supplies
- Technical / financial / statistics: people with serious jobs that require reaching out to colleagues
+ financial
+ natural resources
+ medical
+ patent
- Political
- Gaming
+ Football pools
+ Horseracing picks
- Amateur artists posting cartoons and other artwork, photographers: amateur and pro
- Pets
- Recipes

Some of our initial challenges were dealing with worldwide character sets. it is extremely humbling to see the letters ‘TwitDoc’ appear in tweets in languages you cannot understand and character sets you’ve never seen before. honestly, i love watching the live ‘TwitDoc’ search stream on twitter now

5. If there is one thing, what is it that you think will be the key to twitdoc’s success?
Bob: I think we must get integrated into the major twitter clients. tweetdeck, twhirl, tweetie, etc. We are trying – but these folks are inundated with requests so it takes time. We are also going to make it VERY EASY for websites to integrate TwitDoc themselves – either via our open API or our simple drop-in scripts.

6. What is the business model?
Bob: Our initial focus is on speed, reliability, and establishing the TwitDoc brand. Once we establish TwitDoc as THE way to share docs, we will shift more into longer term strategy. I could see a variety of firms being interested in acquiring us once we establish the brand. also we’ll be able to earn revenue from ads and enhanced services.

7. How’s growth prospect for twitdoc and what kind of future plans are in the work? Technology, Partnership, product offering..etc
Bob: Its very early – we launched about 10 days ago – but we are already amazed at the acceptance by twitter users. our ToDo list is growing quickly and we’ll go wherever our users take us. Here is what we are adding: expanding and simplifying our API as needed, e-mail interface so that users can EMAIL their documents to us with a Subject (tweet) and we’ll publish the file, shorten the URL, and send the subject(tweet) to twitter, web developer tools that make is EASY to integrate TwitDoc on your website/blog.

8. Anything else you want to share with the world?
Yes – just one thing – please pass along to your twitter friends that TwitDoc.com is the EASY way to share your documents on Twitter

The following tools are essential to your day-to-day twitter-managing: they save time, provide valuable insight and let you build valuable twitter network effectively.

1. Download desktop twitter clients:
Get Tweetdeck or http://desktop.seesmic.com; Desktop tools like these two let you get real time tweet feeds from twitter, send your tweet, easily and quickly share links/pictures in real time. The multiple columns let you monitor tweets, direct messages, replies and relevant tweets from people outside your twitter network. This is especially valuable if you want to know what people are twittering in real time. Refer to the feature comparison between tweetdeck and seesmic.

2. Find people to follow and followers:
It would not be fun or useful if you don’t follow anyone. To find interesting people to follow. You can use twitter’s “find people” tool; However if you are like me who does not want to “invite” lot of my real life friends to twitter, you can always think of what interests you the most in real life. Maybe your favorite airline, favorite sportsteam, actress, blogger? For an easy access, I like to use twitterholic.com, which has straightforward ranking without much advertisement on the site. I also like twittercounter.com which provides ranking, remote widget etc. Other high profile directories include wefollow.com; For local twitters, I favor “localtweeps.com” which just launched in early April, Simple UI, easy-to-find info; As you get more “proficient” on twitter and have your favorite people to follow, watch out for their tweets, often time, they will retweet, quote, point you to other interesting twitters. That is how I get to discover most of people that I recently followed. There are also tools making that easy for you. Check out twibe.com, where everyone can recommend friends; Or Mrtweet.com, a highly computerized tool that will monitor how you tweet, then spit out the recommendations in a few days. Other upcoming tools includes twindeXX.com, which is where other people could suggest people for you to follow based on similar interests.

3. Twitter photo:
Bear in mind, you can’t really upload a photo displayed in your twitter tweets. When people talk about uploading a photo, they are referring to the URL links to photos located outside of twitter.com. Twitpic is one of the best photo tools for twitter out there. All you need is your twitter account and upload your photo to twitpic, which will store your photo on twitpic for FREE, and allow you tweet your picture’s URL with one click. TwitPic even let you use your own unique address to email your photos directly into your TwitPic account from your mobile phone. Super sweet.

4. Understanding Overall twitter trend: use TwitScoop to find what are buzzing on twitter. It also provides “tweeting” data from 6 hours to 3 days. If you use tweetdeck, twitscoop is already installed. To understand the twitter stats by username: give tweetstats.com a try. It’s a fabulous tool that lets you find out tweets per hour, per month, timeline, reply statistics; You can find out any other twitter’s stats using this tool, including your clients, your friends, your competitors, president, celebrities. You name it. There is another tool called Monitter, which helps you see what your local twitters are tweeting about. You can set up certain radius around your location, enter the keywords you want to watch, e.g. your brand name, Monitter will display the tweets in real time. (Warning, if you monitor highly popular keywords, there can be way too many tweets flashing through the screen for you to keep up with. So, don’t try…or try it and see. You know what those keywords are;)

5. Automatic twittering tools:
- Sometime it’s convenient to feed your blog post or RSS feed to twitter. Twitterfeed.com is just such a tool to let you feed any blog entry RSS feed into twitter at the time you specify.
- Although it’s not encouraged, there are lot of tools letting you auto-reply to your followers with a direct message saying Thank you. There are also tools letting you mass-follow and mass-unfollow. Flashtweet.com is somewhat a buggy tool but it gets the job done. Be considerate when you use such tool because it is commonly considered as “spam” behavior.

6. For bloggers or website owners:
Put “twit this” or “tweetmeme” button so your site visitors can twit/retweet your blog post for you. If you use wordpress, you can search both plug-ins and automatically install them with 1 click. Super easy. Twitter also provides its own widgets showing your tweets on your website. Twittercounter has a super popular “remote” widget showing which of your twitter friends visits you.

7. Mobile twittering tools:
Twitter would not grow this fast without 3rd party mobile applications. Among hundreds of them, twitterfon is the #1 FREE twitter app you can get from iTune. It has all the basic features you need to twitter anywhere you go.

Enjoy!