Interview with TwindeXX founder Justyn Howard
Are you perfectly happy with the way you found/find interesting people to follow on twitter? If so, skip this. Otherwise, read on.
Today, we will interview founder of a twitter crowd sourcing tool: TwindeXX
TwindeXX.com is “Crowd sourcing the best of twitter”. In its own words:”..(it’s) a better way to find useful people to follow, based on endorsements from the crowd and an inherent level of trust.” Launched early last week, it has seen some steady growth. If done right, it will provide a fresh and useful approach to the twitterverse, in addition to existing twitter directories, pure algorithms (MrTweet), search tools, or manual recommendation (twibe etc.). However, I was not too sure about where and how to start after landing on its home page. Hoping to better understand TwindeXX and expect great growth from them, I decided to send a few interview questions. Justyn Howard, the founder of TwindeXX, was kind enough to give me a nice run down for the project. Here it is, hope you will enjoy:
Q: 1. How did you come up with the idea of twindexx?
When I first started using Twitter about 2 months ago, my friend and fellow author @jillkonrath introduced me to another user, @marismith. Mari (who is awesome) had a blog post about other great people to follow on twitter. Mari and I have similar interests and businesses so I started following people based on her recommendation and found them to be excellent resources. They tweeted about things that were interesting to me, and I was smarter and more informed as a result of following them.
I immediately started to see the value of twitter and wanted to find more great people to follow. I started using tools like #followfriday and wefollow.com to try to find other users to follow, but it wasn’t nearly as useful as the recommendations I got from Mari. I wanted a website where other people could suggest people for me to follow based on similar interests, but there weren’t any. Twindexx.com was something we wished existed, so we made it ourselves.
Q: 2. What is the business and technical appeal of twindexx comparing to other follower searching tools. (Is it smarter than Mr. tweet?)
Time will tell what our biggest appeal is to our users, but there are a few key differences between twindexx.com and other search tools/directories. The primary thing missing from other search tools is context. With #followfriday for example, we see thousands of names of people we should follow, but why? What are they good at? Am I even interested in the things they tweet about?
The biggest difference is that our directory is based on topical suggestions from the community. Many of the other twitter directories have some context, but are based on self promotion (users add themselves). 100 people can tell me I should follow them on twitter, but when someone who’s opinion I value says I should follow someone, I listen. Mr. Tweet is another great tool, but I personally wanted a tool based on who my favorite people followed (and why) as opposed to a computerized algorithm.
The other big benefit to Twindexx.com, which isn’t immediately apparent is the idea of like-mindedness. If @johndoe recommends another user who I also find interesting, wouldn’t it be great if I could see who else @johndoe endorses? Chances are they recommend other people I would be interested in, and I’d love to discover them. This will become much more apparent and useful I think as Twindexx.com grows.
This article also explains our thoughts on what our primary benefits are: http://hashtagremix.com/?p=87
And here’s a post about what we wanted to fix about #followfriday: http://hashtagremix.com/?p=119
Q: 3. How long does it take to develop twindexx?
The current version of Twindexx.com took us about a month to develop. We had an earlier version about two weeks after we came up with the idea, but we didn’t think it was ready. The real answer to your question though is that we’re nowhere near done. We’re updating and fixing things every day and continue to build new functionality in the background.
Q: 4. Who do you consider as established and upcoming competitors.
There are a ton of useful tools for finding people on twitter (twazzup, twibes, wefollow, etc.) but we don’t know of anyone who is really taking the crowd-sourced approach to finding people to follow.
Q: 5. Future plans?
We’re working on a lot of things, some we can discuss, others we have to keep private for now 
Some of the things coming in the near future are oAuth support (no more passwords), shareable groups and a new, fresh interface. We’re also working on ways to make it easier for users to recommend others and will be adding a few other features we think will be useful to our users.
Q: 6. Do you run this app full time with funding or bootstrap?
We are currently “bootstrapped” and operating as a self-funded project, though we may consider taking some angel funding as we develop some of our more aggressive ideas. We’re putting in full time hours at this point, but still juggling with other projects/jobs that bring in the $$ to develop Twindexx.
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