Weekly (belated) twitter apps roundup: June 1 to June 7th 09
Tech world did not slow down a bit while US automobile industry is dying. Among biggest headliners for the past week were Palm Pre’s weekend launch (with 50k units sold) and Bing.com’s formal launch, replacing live.com, victoriously. The heated debate, though, was focused on if Bing.com has replaced Yahoo as #2 search engine, already. In the twitter world, TechCrunch again stirred up a big debate about the “sheep effect”, making the whole online media from NYTimes to influential bloggers throw doubts at twitter’s future. Twitter’s Evan and Biz are perfectly aware of the situation and working to fix the problem. On Tonight’s show with Conan, Conan made fun of twitter world, hence got himself a new name “CoCo”. While name related complaint/lawsuit was a time bomb that was bound to happen (I am talking about St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony La Russa suing twitter for infringement), Twitter gave the world a sneak peak of Verified Accounts Beta. Good for them!
So what is happening to the twitter apps’ world? Are you kidding me? Too much has happened. As I have pointed out, twitter apps are moving toward vertical category and we have plenty of new comers in the field to make your twitter world more fascinating than it already is.
Reportage
It’s “The radical Twitter Radio Tuner for your iPhone.” First of all, it’s a darn cool iPhone App, secondly, it will cost you. Reportage views a Twitter user as a broadcaster and each user’s tweets as a specific broadcast.
Similar to a real radio tuner, Reportage allows you to selectively tune into each broadcaster and visualize the conversation.
ComTweets.com
Do you really really want to find out what your coworkers are tweeting about? Is your company big enough that you have to dig your coworkers out of twitter world? Is twitter absolutely beneficial to your business and more? If the answers are yes, ComTweets.com is for you. Notable companies like Microsoft, Google, BestBuy, IBM (wow, so many big names) are on ComTweets.com, “It helps you find your coworkers who are twittering, discover the latest buzzes in your company, and show your personalized brand images to your customers.”
Tweba.com
Tweba wants to be craigslist of twitter. “Tweba is the Free way to buy and sell your stuff on Twitter.
Tweba allows you to auction your stuff, sell your stuff for a fixed price or link to your stuff already listed on other sites all for free. To get started either add a Listing directly on Tweba or enter a Tweet on Twitter with #ihave or #wanttosell and your tweet will be added to Tweba. When Listing ends, Buyer pays by Google Checkout, Paypal or an Out of Tweebay Transaction.
twittypop.com
Twittpop asks you one question: who is the hottest boy or girl on twitter? In its essence though, it’s a fun way of discovering new people on Twitter, increasing your followers, sending out a crush notification, or checking your own popularity. If you find someone you like, you can vote for him or her. When you vote for them, they’ll bubble to the top, which means they’ll get discovered by other tweeps.
I am big on twitter
140labs.com just released its first experiment: Iambigontwitter.com, an exact model in the twitter world like hotOrnot.com in the plain web world. Considering it’s coming out of 140labs which has bunch of high profile, successful web entrepreneurs behind it, I would definitely give it a few spins to see how it plays out, against all other “voting”, “popularity”, “dating” sites on twitter.
Twuet.com
Twuet is a search engine for twitter that lets you add a search box widget to your site. I have not got chance to see how the search results render on this blog, but looking at the search results itself it’s decent.
Tweetknot.com
I have a feeling that tweetKnot is doing similar things to twibes. Yes, you can create a community called “knots” and other people can share tweets related to that community (or subject). The traffic and attention this site is getting is phenomenal. It seems more obvious to me that vertical community within twitter is the direction to be. My take is to avoid being generic site, unless your usability is superb.
DateTwit.com
I noticed this dating site for twitter a week ago, after noticing flirt140.com is pretty much walking dead, merely 3 weeks after launching. However DateTwit.com is very different. It’s easy to understand, although requires a bit more work on your side to set up your detailed profile, sending out smiles, messages, twits etc. And the traffic it’s getting lately was just insane for a twitter dating site.
Amost.At
Almost.at is a site that allows users to follow events in real time across Twitter, Flickr, and a variety of other online services. It also allows users to specify which Twitter members are actually at an event, rather than just talking about it. TechCrunch has a rather detailed coverage on it.
