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A “quiet” tweet from @marshallk (VP of ReadWriteWeb) a few weeks ago introduced me to the world of tweepz.com, a twitter people search engine with good number of indexed tweeps, efficient filter, easy to follow UI. Developed by a dutch based developer named Jochem Prins from Exalead, tweepz has the potential to be the best people search engine in the twitter universe. You have to see my interview with Jochem to see through that. It’s really a powerful tool with great future.

1. What is the tweepz.com? What is your vision behind it? What is the goal of tweepz.com? Can you explain a bit about the real time search’s landscape and how tweepz will prosper?
Tweepz is a people search engine which helps you find and discover people on twitter. We found it kind if difficult to look for people who might be interesting to follow (using the tools provided by twitter). The aim of Tweepz is to make this a lot easier and maybe even fun to do. The power of Tweepz is that it enables you to find people by their biography, location and name. This can be of help when you are looking for people to follow from a specific company, with a specific hobby or expertise etc.

As tweepz searches through the profiles of people and not particularly through the status updates, the real-time aspect is less important here. What we do think is that the authority or trust people have in the community will become an important aspect in real-time search (as pagerank is in websearch). Tweepz could play a role here by indicating who is a high ranked tweep on a specific subject.

2. How did you come up with the idea? How’s your past background serve up this venture?
The idea arised simply because we had problems ourselves while finding new people on twitter. As our company (Exalead) develops search technology we decided to develop a solution for this.

3. How long did it take to bring idea to launch? Are you a full blown start up with funding or bootstrapping?
Not long Exalead’s platform is very agile so the main effort was to setup the crawling. The site went online only two weeks after we started the development.

4. How’s user adoption so far since launch (when)?
We soft-launched by the end of March 2009, the first publication about tweepz was early april after which the usage started growing. We are pretty happy with the adaption so far and receive a lot of valuable feedback. Nevertheless, given the huge twitter community we can always do better

5. Tweepz has a nice filter system built in that I like, however it only searches people’s profile. Is that your focus?
Yes, the profile’s are our focus. We do plan to start indexing people’s homepage and take into account which subjects people tweet about. But the aim is to be a people search engine.

6. How do you compare to other twitter search engines, especially twazzup.com?
The main difference is that Twazzup searches within status updates and Tweepz within profiles. I guess both services can very well be used next to each other or maybe even integrated based on API’s.

7. What is the business models for tweepz.com, are you profitable?
Making money is not our goal at the moment. Costs are relatively low and we rather focus on offering a valuable application. We can imagine to offer ‘featured users’ spots in the future, or maybe offer premium services for corporate use (for example for recruiters).

8. If there is one thing What it is that is critical to tweepz.com’s success?
First of all, people will have to be aware that we exist. Next to that, we believe that we should provide an open platform so that’s why we are working hard on providing a Tweepz API. This API will for example make it possible to integrate Tweepz in twitter clients like Tweetdeck and Seesmic or in other mashup-based applications like twazzup.

9. Future plans? Technology, business partnership, products etc.?
I think I already mentioned a couple, but these are things which are on the roadmap:
- provide an API
- start indexing people’s homepage
- provide personal recommendations for people you might like to follow
- OAuth for a better integration with twitter
- Improve our coverage: index more people on twitter and possibly other social platforms

Tags: people search, real time search, twazzup, tweepz, tweepz.com, twitter, twitter people, twitter search engine

This entry was posted on Friday, May 22nd, 2009 at 1:37 pm and is filed under Deserving Twitter Apps, Interviews: Twitter App Founders Round Table. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.