Interview with founder/developer of TwitOaster.com: could be bloggers’ next best friend
Once in a while, a twitter app will come from nowhere does exact the things I wanted it to do, in this case, organizing my conversations. Lot of times when I got a reply or “mention” on twitter, the first reaction was “WTF?”, I was not really sure where it came from and what it was referring to. TwitOaster.com and Tweetree.com are two apps helping us organizing twitter conversation. While Tweetree.com has been around a little longer and more established which I will interview later, I thought it would be interesting to see how TwitOaster.com‘s inventor think about twitter eco system.
Introducing Arnaud Meunier, the French guy behind TwitOaster. Similar to me, English is his 2nd language;) Keep reading till the end to see his killer future plan for twitoaster, which may very well become bloggers’ new best friend.
1. What is Twitoaster.com?
Twitoaster threads your Twitter conversations, helping you sort out your replies in their context. It also extracts hashtags and links from your tweets, provides you statistics and charts about your conversations, brings you extended ( > 140 chars) tweets, replies ranking… In a word, Twitoaster aims to help you with Twitter conversations, and everything related to them.
2. How did you come up with the idea?
Twitter conversations are something great but hard to follow. The idea was to highlight those, bringing you all the background and context you need. That way, when someone tells you something like “@bob This is so funny!” you understand perfectly what he found so hysterical.
3. How your personal/professional background served up your venture?
I have been developing a couple of community oriented web projects. The one who helped me the most with Twitoaster experience is probably Hyjoo.com, a French discussion board I founded years ago. Twitoaster is all about conversations, threading them like on a message board / forum. A real board administration experience was useful to have, and will probably keep helping me for next features development.
4. How long did it take to bring the idea to launch? Are you a full blown start up with funding or bootstrapping?
This first version asked roughly two months of development. But Twitoaster is still in an early beta stage, improved almost daily. The start-up is self-funded, and for now, it’s a one person team (me! well… if you excludes the birds on the about page)
5. How’s user adoption so far? Who are using your services?
The service has just launched, and I’m quite impressed by the number of users who are using and talking about it. Twitoaster already received a couple of blog articles, and a video was even made on it. It’s something I really appreciated, and if user adoption is still confidential, this gives me great hope for its future.
From journalists like David Pogue (hope Twitoaster will help him write his book, by the way) to companies who are using it as a CRM tool, or Blogs and Medias… There is no “Twitoaster typical user profile”. Actually, any user or company receiving replies could be interested by the service.
6. If there is one thing that you think the key to the growth of twitoaster, what is it?
Its main feature: conversation handling. And the way it’s done: on a Twitter-like profile page automatically updated. The service is dead simple to use: you just have to login and / or to follow @twitoaster. The rest comes very easily.
7. Future plan? Technology, business partnership, products etc.?
A lot of new features developments are already planned. For example, pictures in tweets: why not replace those links to some twitpic image with a nice thumb you can enlarge when you click on it? That kind of features will be implemented depending on users’ suggestions. Twitoaster is and will always be opened to any kind of comments and suggestions; it’s only going to get better.
The most exciting part will probably be the Twitoaster API. Other Twitter applications and clients will be able to use it in order to get the conversation, background and context around a tweet.
I’m also thinking to Blogging platforms as lots of bloggers use to tweet when they post, and recceive their comments directly on Twitter. The Twitoaster API could be used to integrate these replies into their blog comments.
In fact, there are tons of great ideas to have around tweets context and conversations. Twitoaster API will aim to help developers realize them.
8. What is the business model?
I believe Twitter conversations provide great opportunities for contextual advertising. But don’t think intrusive or annoying: Twitoaster users will have the possibility to disable ads.
For businesses, I’m also thinking to premium services and specific API calls developments. For example: CRM oriented features, audience ratings, information intermediaries (assisting companies understand their market / followers reactions)…
