Dig deep with Tweetbrain.com’s founder DeXin
I had an interview with Tweetbrain.com’s founder @DeXin, a very pleasant lady who currently lives/works in Silicon Valley, originally came from China (same as me). TweetBrain is much like Yahoo Answers in the twitter world, where people can ask questions, answer questions, search for answers etc. While there are many similar services in and out of twitter world, I wanted to know how tweetbrain.com uses twitter massive content intelligently to its own advantage.
1. How did you come up with the idea?
My first tweet on Twitter was Dec 5, 08, right away I realized that lots of users are using Twitter to do journalism and crowd-sourcing. However, I also noticed the limitations of doing both on Twitter.I have been tweeting about crowd-sourcing and cloud computing since day one, and often getting questions about these two topics from my followers, some of the questions are really repetitive. Because the live stream nature of Twitter, my answer cannot be found by other users easily. Sometimes, I see interesting questions asked by other users, and am interested in the answers that they have received too. Unless I do an active search, and filter out the irrelevant tweets, there is no way for me to glance through the answers right away.
In addition, there are times I want to go back to a question a user asked sometime ago, it is practically impossible to dig out the info anymore.
Furthermore, I noticed that unless a user has a large following, the responses the user gets usually are iffy. Since I have been in IT business for more than a decade, I thought, “hmmm… I can address all these issues, plus make something cool too”.
2. “I have already found so much knowledge, so many experts otherwise I would never have discovered after joining twitter, what additional value tweetbrain can bring on top of twitter?”
To all Twitter users, TweetBrain helps you to build more connections to power Twitter users; it helps you to strengthen existing connections. A connection is far more valuable than a simple follow/following chain. It’s a deeper relation and lasts.Next, I will elaborate its value to the majority of Twitter users; such a group usually have limited number of followers on Twitter. Thus, their “reach” in the Twitter world is quite limited. Sure, you can message anyone on Twitter, but that depends on what and who you know significantly.
TweetBrain helps you to build up more connections through the interchanges of Q&As, with fellow Twitter users both within your existing Twitter circle and beyond.
TweetBrain also enables you to spot experts active on Twitter who has established themselves via fruitful mutually beneficial Q&A exchanges on TweetBrain. By being active on TweetBrain, they are likely to be receptive to your approaches.
Indirectly, TweetBrain thus also solves a big problems with Twitter for a lot people: what if you wish to have a high signal/noise ratio from Twitter’s live tweet stream? Note that TweetBrain makes the results of Q&A exchanges persistent, manageable, and searchable, making future references so much easier. As such, it
also enhances an expert’s reputation over time.The persistent nature of these Q&A exchanges is an excellent basis for various useful statistics, e.g. for customer sentiment gauging, and improved customer care. In cases you are looking for high value advices, doing so on Twitter obviously is inconvenient. With TweetBrain, with its integrated micro-payment system, you can add a financial incentive to boost the chance of getting an answer. The reward certainly is a welcomed bonus to the answerer, regardless s/he is an established expert or not.
3. How long did it take to develop the project to current level? Is it a full time startup with funding, or do you bootstrap?
I started conceptualize the project in middle December last year. The implementation began around Feb. About two months after that, TweetBrain went live. It’s a more than a full time job. I am funding it via my current business and will be doing so for sometime. Nevertheless, I am open to Angel investments so as to speed up the progress.4. Recent state of adoption rate and Future plan?
I think the adoption rate is healthy, considering it’s new and still evolving. The traffic is quite steady so far. Near term future plans include establishing a core user group, implementing user feedbacks collected so far to make TweetBrain great rather than just good. In the long run, there is a possibility of making it a knowledge base for the Twitter community. We are also considering some other ways to make TweetBrain profitable as soon as possible.
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