2above.com

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.”

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).