aggregators - TheWayoftheWeb

All that Twitters is not gold for Twitturly

November 18, 2009 By Dan Thornton Leave a Comment

For a while it seemed as if building a third-party application for Twitter was a route to instant fortune (as were Facebook apps before it, and iPhone apps after it). But judging by the eventual sale of Twitter link tracker and aggregator Twitturly, it appears that bubble may now have burst.

Since launching in April 2008, rivals such as Tweetmeme and Topsy have joined the Twitter aggregator space – and when founder Joel Strellner put the site up for auction, just 5 bids came in, with a final price of ‘no more than $8,500′ (HT Techcrunch).

Having said that, Strellner has moved onto other things, leaving the site with a Google PR of 6, Alexa ranking of 40,106, and most importantly, only around 1000 Unique Users per day. And less than 1000 visitors per day definitely doesn’t get the big bucks.

Twitturly

The only thing I can’t understand is why there wasn’t more effort to boost PR and visitor numbers immediately prior to the sale? Then again, the auction details reveal Strellner is working full time, didn’t want to invest more in costs (the EC2 server costs were apparently around $3k per month), and has also recently found his free time taken away by becoming a father (Something which I can totally understand!)

It will be interesting to see whether the new owner can make use of the 622GB data, the agreement to access the Summize (Twitter Search) API an unlimited amount, and a site which claimed 5000 UUs per day.

Buffer

Filed Under: Monetising, Tools, twitter Tagged With: aggregators, data, making money, third party applications, twitter, twitter search, twitturly

Social micro blog news aggregator thingamadoodles

September 22, 2008 By Dan Thornton 1 Comment

Not the catchiest title for a genre of sites, but it works! I’ve posted before on my other blog about why I’m not a huge fan of Digg, (and alternatives to it) but it’s silly to deny the fact it’s a hugely popular site and format, and that some of the issues I have are Digg specific.

And there are two sites offering microblogging aggregation. I found Microblogging.com via founder @ShaunMorton on Twitter. It’s essentially a niche social news gathering site for microblogging, and there’s nothing wrong with that! One of my remarks about Digg was that it increasingly faces a challenge from niche focussed rivals. It’ll be interesting to see if microblogging has enough interest to build a critical mass.

Dwigger has been covered elsewhere, but in the spirit of retweeting it’s an aggregator of tweets themselves, and it also creates threaded conversations with images and even video. Which is an interesting idea, but I suspect slightly flawed. The reasoning behind Twitter is that my contacts will be the filter of relevancy and interest, so it seems counterintuitive to go and seek out what complete strangers are judging to be relevant or important except as an object of curiousity. And Twitter Search allows me to see if terms are popular by volume across the whole of Twitter, rather than the microcosm of Twitterati who also use Dwigger.

Dwigger is by Sift Partners, so I’ll try and drop them a line shortly and get a detailed explanation of what I might be missing, and I’ll keep the jurt out until then, but I’m not sure there’s enough of a mass of microbloggers for these types of service quite yet. Considering Digg runs on around 20 million+ users a month, Stumbleupon is hitting around 6 million registered, and Twitter is around the 2-3 million mark, Microblogging.com and Dwigger might need a fair bit of patience to capitalise on the new communication medium.

Buffer

Filed Under: New launches, twitter Tagged With: aggregators, digg, dwigger, microblogging, microblogging.com, shaunmorton, sift partners, social, twitter search

There really is nothing new in Web 2.0

May 22, 2008 By Dan Thornton 4 Comments

It’s been said before, but having chatted with some of my readers, and having been unable to quickly find a previous online example, I though it’s worth restating: There’s nothing new in Web 2.0.

And by that, I mean there’s nothing new about the facilities Web 2.0 offers. And now for some examples:

Tagging: Every time you’ve labeled anything in your life, you’ve tagged it. Putting your bills in a folder, putting a sticker on your homemade chutney, or creating a mixtape of songs. If only we’d called it labeling, rather than tagging, I’d have saved myself a few hours of explaining. And a Folksonomy is just what happens when information is structured by people labeling it.

Social networking: Every time you’ve been introduced to someone via a friend, or found yourself chatting to someone you’ve stood next to at a concert, or at the football, you’ve networked socially. Facebook and Myspace are the internet equivalents of your local pub, or the reading group at the local library.

Blogging: Diaries. Fanzines. The family newsletter tucked inside Christmas cards. Newspaper columns.

Crowdsourcing: Happened hundreds of years ago. Sticking up a ‘Wanted’ poster and offering a bounty was crowdsourcing people to catch a criminal.

Social news aggregators (e.g. Digg): Just recording online the same opinions you’d get chatting around the office coffee machine/smoking area.

Word of Mouth, Buzz, Social Media Marketing: When your pipe sprung a leak last night, and you came into work and asked your friend if they knew a good plumber – that’s Word of Mouth. Buzz is just getting lots of people talking and recommending. And social media marketing is just using the new online gathering places.

I did lie earlier.

There is one new thing about all Web 2.0 technology which radically changes everything we know. It’s made it so much easier to do all these things, that the amount of people involved, and the effects, have been amplified 100s, 1000s or even millions of times. It’s always happened. But now it’s happening on a global scale, and in a way that can change the fortunes of businesses.

Buffer