2above.com

Let’s look at the three web services Getsatisfaction.com, uservoice.com and followbase.com, see what lessons entrepreneur can learn from them. If you don’t know about them, Getsatisfaction and uservoice are similar web service offering businesses an easy way to get customer feedback and track them, while followbase is a customer service app via twitter. I personally like getsatisfaction and uservoice, and don’t think followbase can be a lasting success. Following are 5 things I use to evaluate the potential of a startup, including projects I personally involve.

1. Is the market (I am trying to enter) big enough?
Getsatisfaction and uservoice mainly target at businesses with a website, which is pretty much all businesses. Every business wants to hear what their customers think about them, and there were not an easy, affordable way to do it. They come in to fill the space and become a runaway success stories. Now think about customer service, does everyone need customer service? Yes and no. Among all services I buy (cell phone, airline, cable, credit card etc.) I probably call customer service once every two to three months, so it’s not a whole lot for me. It’s probably the case for most of people. If I am targeting at everyone, then the problem I am solving should be more than the need for consumer customer service.

2. Is it a niche problem in a big market that really needs some help?
Getsatisfaction and uservoice are solving a niche problem of a big market (all businesses with website) by offering a feedback forum that websites can carry with them wherever they go and easily get feedbacks. I think that is MONEY! Now let’s look at customer service that followbase aims. I already said consumer customer service is NOT a huge market. But are there opportunities? I think so. Customer service is a HUGE headache or issues for most businesses, more so than to consumers. Each industry is different and customer service can get really complex. A twitter based customer service product like followbase is a good idea, but it won’t solve problems for consumers nor businesses. Businesses need an industry specialized service/product to address their unique problems; consumer, again, unless, they really are passionate about certain market, they won’t care it enough to use followbase. I just don’t care about the pains from cell phone services enough to use another service just to complain; but if I am a x-box fanatics, I would care not only about problems of my x-box, but every move microsoft will make to x-box.

3. Can it be successful trying to cover all segments?
Since most of people don’t complain very often about a particular service they purchased, would it make sense to get all services in one site, so it will address everyone’s problem about every services under the sun? Followbase tries to do that. I think there is a chance, but a small one. They will have chance when majority of brands join it to become one stop twitter customer service central. Can this happen? Possibly. But unlikely, unless the service provided to businesses or brands are so appealing (think about cotweets, which can be appealing for brands or businesses).

4. Think again, are you serving opposite parties? (comcast vs. consumer, e.g.) who are you serving: businesses or consumers? (hence the future business model, and oh, forget about advertising for now)
You tend to answer: I want to serve both. Followbase might think it serves both sides. But I tend to think an early, focused startup with big potential has to pick their focus. You either become service provider for businesses, or consumers, hence you provide value to that party and you can get paid by the party you serve. Getsatisfaction and uservoice serve the businesses with a website, and businesses are glad to pay them for that. Would businesses pay followbase, hardly. But it’s very early for them, they can come up with better killer product be it a destination website, or white labeled service. I know consumer would not pay for that any time soon, unless, unless, it’s industry specific.

5. Real time is not enough, Tweets are not enough.
Most twitter apps are half idle. A few super successful of them includes mobile/3rd party clients, twitter visualization or analytics app such as twittercounter.com, twitter multimedia app like twitpic etc.; twitter search engines such as tweetmeme and topsy.com; (even tweepz and twazzup are trending down). Majority of twitter apps pump live tweets into their app. I have news for you: tweets are not enough. Because most of individual tweets pumped through are out of context and meaningless on the app, apps relying on that either have gone completely idle, or limited by growth potential: I liked stocktwits, cheaptweets, they are profitable, they are great. But how big can they be? Twazzup? Well, they are brilliant engineers, but showing tweets alone with some data processing, featured people, photo, tweets is not enough, it isn’t on the same level with big guys like topsy.com and tweetmeme.

6. Which API should I use? Should I develop twitter app, or linkedin App, or iphone App, or facebook app?
My suggestion is: forget about API all together. Think about your unique vision. Vision comes from expertise, project experience, or just repetitive life experiences about things we go through. Rachael Rae’s vision was 30 minute meal, Jack Dorsey’s was information dispatch, hence twitter; Instead of thinking about what APP you can build with what API, think about your vision and life experiences. That will lead you to the problems or pains you see while others don’t. After that, think about solutions to that problem. Technology comes last.

I write this article to help myself to clear my own mind as well. And I find myself no longer trying to ride certain wave to make quick money, rather, I am focusing on what my vision will lead to. That is more tangible and lasting.

Having seen so many twitter apps in the past couple of months, I have not been wowed more than a few times in a week, but I was seriously wowed three times last week! Among the long list of twitter apps I was looking at, these three twitter apps will charm you. It will make you smile, laugh, or at least slightly richer, if you decide to sell a little bit of your soul. No matter how you feel, these apps are high quality, relatively well thought out, some may have bright future, I think.

My pick of the week:Streaming live from twitter!

Twitcam lets you broadcasting live from your webcam and twit about it, while you are at it broadcasting, you can also chat with your viewers via Twitter right from your broadcast page. This application is not only fun, but can be extremely useful for bloggers, businesses/brands to get one step closer to followers.

My runner up of the week

If you have been on twitter for a while, you know getting a customized twitter profile background is the next fun step that should not be hard to achieve. t.wist.it grabs your flickr’s newest set of photos and automatically set them as your profile background. It’s so easy caveman can do it! My profile had a makeover (with my fabulous photos) before I knew it. Must try!

It’s all about money, again

I have never tried but always been interested in knowing the “ad network” on twitter, there are quite a few of them. Twivert is one of the newest, and is seeing exponential growth last week. Somehow, no matter how many people are against the idea of selling “contextual” ad tweets (it’s like selling your soul, according to one of the bloggers who are against it), ad networks continue to grab a lot of traffic, although I really don’t know the # for the actual monetary transactions. In its own words, Twivert provides “value ads” which you can share with your friends through twitter. When someone clicks on these ads you get paid, thats it.

I just recently discovered when I write in a super bad or super pissed off, or super good mood, I write like Paul Carr, the newly hire at Techcrunch. While I have been away from my own blog for a while, here is the first lousy attempt for the weekly round up in the twitter app. Seriously, all I did was to dig into my previous notes (4 months old), shit load of techcrunch posts for the whole week, (seriously, the economy is bad but TC keeps hiring crazy kids, someone is getting paid!) and occasionally, I took a look at RWW, a more geeky tech blog in my opinion. I used to get my tipped off from entrepreneurs themselves and I still occasionally do but for now, let’s just be lazy.

So what are the big stories last week?: Zappo got its big pay day from Amazon; Rumors about Apple’s tablet PC (I think it will be AWESOME!, not the rumor, the iTab, oops that is just my guess of its name). Yahoo’s earning dropped 13%, Google’s earning increased by 3%, Microsoft: missed earning – for every dollar it made from online, it lost in its campaign. This is exactly like my CPC ad budget allocated among Google, Yahoo and MSN, in a slightly different proportion. Yahoo bought Xoopit (again, no idea what they do); Kevin Spacy explained twitter to David letterman, who in turn called twitter a waste of time. Twitter cracked down spam account and I lost more than 100 spam followers in one day, yeah! I was trying to lose them forever. Twitter unveiled a live-updating twitter search widget and twitter 101 for business. But what is the big deal about it? Twazzup does that live update ages ago!

In the twitter app world, following is a mix of new and old relevant apps.
1. twitterAround.com
2. Buddy Media’s “ultimate twitter client for brand management”, think cotweet for brand marketing.
3. Localbunny.com: problematic, but smart idea helping small business stay on top of market pulse through keyword identification and in time response.
4. tunein.com: find relevant information through people you care
5. tweetlinx, twitRollr, tweetMixx.com, retweet.com: all trying to do similar things as tweetmeme
6. Izea’s sponsoredtwts.com: ad network for twitter, similar players like twittAd.com, tweetROI, adcause.com, magpie.

That is the quick lousy update for the tech world. Thanks to the inner hard working me trying to get myself back on track on a foggy Sunday night like this one. Cheers!

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!

Tech world did not slow down a bit while US automobile industry is dying. Among biggest headliners for the past week were Palm Pre’s weekend launch (with 50k units sold) and Bing.com’s formal launch, replacing live.com, victoriously. The heated debate, though, was focused on if Bing.com has replaced Yahoo as #2 search engine, already. In the twitter world, TechCrunch again stirred up a big debate about the “sheep effect”, making the whole online media from NYTimes to influential bloggers throw doubts at twitter’s future. Twitter’s Evan and Biz are perfectly aware of the situation and working to fix the problem. On Tonight’s show with Conan, Conan made fun of twitter world, hence got himself a new name “CoCo”. While name related complaint/lawsuit was a time bomb that was bound to happen (I am talking about St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony La Russa suing twitter for infringement), Twitter gave the world a sneak peak of Verified Accounts Beta. Good for them!

So what is happening to the twitter apps’ world? Are you kidding me? Too much has happened. As I have pointed out, twitter apps are moving toward vertical category and we have plenty of new comers in the field to make your twitter world more fascinating than it already is.

Reportage

It’s “The radical Twitter Radio Tuner for your iPhone.” First of all, it’s a darn cool iPhone App, secondly, it will cost you. Reportage views a Twitter user as a broadcaster and each user’s tweets as a specific broadcast.
Similar to a real radio tuner, Reportage allows you to selectively tune into each broadcaster and visualize the conversation.

ComTweets.com

Do you really really want to find out what your coworkers are tweeting about? Is your company big enough that you have to dig your coworkers out of twitter world? Is twitter absolutely beneficial to your business and more? If the answers are yes, ComTweets.com is for you. Notable companies like Microsoft, Google, BestBuy, IBM (wow, so many big names) are on ComTweets.com, “It helps you find your coworkers who are twittering, discover the latest buzzes in your company, and show your personalized brand images to your customers.”

Tweba.com

Tweba wants to be craigslist of twitter. “Tweba is the Free way to buy and sell your stuff on Twitter.
Tweba allows you to auction your stuff, sell your stuff for a fixed price or link to your stuff already listed on other sites all for free. To get started either add a Listing directly on Tweba or enter a Tweet on Twitter with #ihave or #wanttosell and your tweet will be added to Tweba. When Listing ends, Buyer pays by Google Checkout, Paypal or an Out of Tweebay Transaction.

twittypop.com

Twittpop asks you one question: who is the hottest boy or girl on twitter? In its essence though, it’s a fun way of discovering new people on Twitter, increasing your followers, sending out a crush notification, or checking your own popularity. If you find someone you like, you can vote for him or her. When you vote for them, they’ll bubble to the top, which means they’ll get discovered by other tweeps.

I am big on twitter
140labs.com just released its first experiment: Iambigontwitter.com, an exact model in the twitter world like hotOrnot.com in the plain web world. Considering it’s coming out of 140labs which has bunch of high profile, successful web entrepreneurs behind it, I would definitely give it a few spins to see how it plays out, against all other “voting”, “popularity”, “dating” sites on twitter.

Twuet.com

Twuet is a search engine for twitter that lets you add a search box widget to your site. I have not got chance to see how the search results render on this blog, but looking at the search results itself it’s decent.

Tweetknot.com

I have a feeling that tweetKnot is doing similar things to twibes. Yes, you can create a community called “knots” and other people can share tweets related to that community (or subject). The traffic and attention this site is getting is phenomenal. It seems more obvious to me that vertical community within twitter is the direction to be. My take is to avoid being generic site, unless your usability is superb.

DateTwit.com

I noticed this dating site for twitter a week ago, after noticing flirt140.com is pretty much walking dead, merely 3 weeks after launching. However DateTwit.com is very different. It’s easy to understand, although requires a bit more work on your side to set up your detailed profile, sending out smiles, messages, twits etc. And the traffic it’s getting lately was just insane for a twitter dating site.

Amost.At

Almost.at is a site that allows users to follow events in real time across Twitter, Flickr, and a variety of other online services. It also allows users to specify which Twitter members are actually at an event, rather than just talking about it. TechCrunch has a rather detailed coverage on it.

What a week! I have been pretty much away from twitter due to personal reasons. Yet, the tech world never stopped spinning without me;) Microsoft’s new search engine “Bing” is out banging everyone, Google Wave makes everybody dizzy, Yahoo shut down its 360 (how many more they will keep shutting down before someone else shuts down them?), Facebook got $200 million from Russian gangsters, Yahoo and Google both came out with their own iphone voice search, none can recognize my f**ing name. TweetDeck seems to have found (sort of) its business model, at least out chasing its music dreams. As to our mother ship twitter.com? It was as busy and crappy and worse than previous weeks when it comes to reliability and performance: the site was down, the site was hit by a worm, the founder was heading to hollywood…yawning, WHATEVER. What can you do? It’s like a young virgin behaving like a middle aged horny mother f**r! Well, when there is only one cook in the kitchen, you have got to put up with whatever the crap he will serve you.

Ok, ok, none of them has anything to do with new Twitter apps. Stuff happens, and I am just bitching.

Twitter apps though, will probably make your life a little easier, or even happier (it has nothing to do with the first twitter conference being held at Mountain View’s computer history museum)…Unlike previous weeks when twitter apps were pretty much focusing on boring follower management, conversation management, or slightly more interesting searches etc., we have seen a new trend moving toward the vertical industry including music, games, t-shirts, travels, payment etc., with A LOT OF CREATIVITY, which I think it’s the right direction and bound to happen more often.

SongTwit.com

Readwriteweb writes that “Songtwit gives users a three-step process for sending music via Twitter, the song could be on a website, on a user’s hard drive, or in the SongTwit library, which seems to consist of third party-hosted audio clips”. it’s essentially a music swapping service, “There are a few flaws of the service, aside from the DM-less-ness.” Writes rww. DM-less-ness aside, I love this service! Try it out!

The 99 most popular songs on twitter right now

It’s a page launched by we are hunted showing the top 99 songs voted by twitter users. If you are like me, LAZY, you will LOVE this service. You don’t have to think, all the top songs are there, voted by the twitter crowd. For those slightly geeky and curious, rww writes “sampling Twitter throughout the day looking for tweets that indicate someone is listening to or playing music and analyzing these tweets in our semantic engine…In other words, the engine doesn’t track mere mentions of an artist or song, but looks for evidence that the song is getting airtime in earbuds; we can speculate that the engine tracks events such as Blip.fm and Last.fm updates in Twitter streams”……also, “The top 40 on the Twitter chart represented a slightly vintage bent and included Pink Floyd, the Doors, Bob Dylan, The Cure, older Metallica, AC/DC, and Led Zeppelin, as well as a smattering of ’90s grunge tracks.”

Spymaster

Most viral twitter app known to date, reported by Techcrunch, saying “Spymaster is a new social game based around Twitter in which you do spy-like things such as buy things on the black market, assassinations and put money in Swiss bank accounts.”. On its site, it says “service is currently only open to a group of elite player” – I have news for you spymaster: knock knock, go f*** yourself.

Trazzler Buzz

Trazzler helps you answer one question, “Where should I go?” by recommending trips unique to your location and Travel Personality. Endorsed by Twitter itself, Trazzler does have its creativity and guts to take on something big. In its own words:”All of our trips are hand-picked—we don’t include poor-quality writing and we don’t scrape third-party websites.” Originally inspired by twitter Co-founder Biz Stone’s “virtual teleportation”, implemented by travel industry veteran Adam Rugel, the Trazzler Buzz list is 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. Trazzler buzz ranks the list according to a formula that measures volume and recent activity on Twitter. It claims “it is the ultimate source of research on where people are going (or want to go) right now.” For those slightly geeky and curious, Trazzler develops its own “lists” of places which entirely rely on its own editors and crowd sourcing wiki style. Just take a look at their Google doc for phrases they currently twitter in San Francisco

Are they Cool? Very. Will be succeed? I have my doubts, UNLESS they narrow their focus. Just wait and see.

Make money with TweetBucks

TweetBucks is all about making money. It’s a URL shortening service matching your original URL to its 1000’s of affiliate merchant programs, if your traffic converts into a sale, Tweetbucks will keep 30% of your commission sales. They also offer an ad frame CPC model on top of your destination page, if you choose this option. They also have a referral program in place. Tweetbucks is also open to Merchant to participate as an additional marketing channel on twitter. You can tell Tweetbucks is pretty much covering all grounds possible, the only thing left to see is if twitter followers bite. Honestly, I don’t think this is how twitter is supposed to be used and I personally may have hard time to adopt their model, if at all. Cool ideas and great implementation though.

FileTwt.com

A couple weeks ago, I interviewed TwitDoc.com’s founder Bob Brinke, it’s surprising to see another file sharing on twitter popped up. Filetwt seems to be even more straightforward to use.

ViralHeat.com

Viralheat tracks the pulse of the web. Get realtime results across 200 video sharing sites, microblogs, websites, blogs and social networks in one dashboard, of course, including twitter. Built from the ground up to be timely and efficient, Viralheat allows users to easily comprehend social media. Still in private beta, it already has a business model, charging as low as $9.99 for you to monitor your brand on social media!

Twollars.com

In its own words: Twollars is a currency of appreciation for Twitter. Twollars are designed to reward positive actions. You can give Twollars when someone helps you by tweeting useful information, sharing a tip, writing an inspiring Tweet or if you are just feeling generous.

Twitter On Tees

The established online tees shop threadless just launched its twitter on tees not long ago. Yes, you guess it right, You can make money by submitting your own tweets, if used, you will get paid. Similar idea to TwitShirt.com. Btw, I completely agree with that tweet up there;)

Tracking twitter

After 2 hours writing on this blog, I am tired. This is it, the last one, although I have probably another dozen apps to write up. Developed as a client management tool at electricartists, “Twitter Tracker is a real-time listing of the top media, entertainment, and consumer product feeds they’re currently following on Twitter.” (Electric Artists is a leading digital brand management and strategy agency.) It’s really is a twitter ranking board by categories including brand, media, celebs etc., I like the way.

Ok, ok, last one

Mixero.com

Mixero is a new generation twitter client with lot of cool utilities, such as group, Smart previous, URL auto completion. In its own words: “The new generation Twitter client for people who value their time and are tired of information noise.”

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.