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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.

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

Twitter is making a lot of moves right now…

May 7, 2009 By Dan Thornton 1 Comment

It’s always interesting following the various rumours concering who might be buying Twitter etc, but it’s a lot more fun when Twitter itself starts making a lot of changes – particularly when co-founder Biz Stone is publicly dismissing the rumours and saying Twitter isn’t for sale.

Twitter search is going to get a lot more interesting (Cnet)

Twitter search will soon crawl links included in Tweets and that content, along with a reputation ranking system – as confirmed by Twitter VP of Operations, Santosh Jayaram, who was formerly VP of Search Quality for Google.

Enhanced new follower emails (LousGray)

New follower emails include the new follower’s name, Twitter username, and picture. They also include the number of updates, number of people they follow, and number of followers they have, plus the ability to block them from within the email.

Twitter replaces TinyURL with Bit.ly as url shortener (RWW)

Until now, Twitter automatically shortened links with TinyURL, but the switch to Bit.ly (Which I use anyway), means a lot more analytics, as well as an increase in reliability (given as the primary reason for the switch).

Considering Twitter’s self-monetisation (rather than selling) was scheduled for early this year, it’s not hard to see the increase in data capabilities from Search and Bit.ly, which could easily tie-in to an upsell for businesses etc using the service.

Meanwhile the issue of mainstream adoption and scaling of email alerts is something which is affecting businesses and individuals, and is something 3rd party services were already capitalising on.

What happens next?

Aside from the integration of all of the data tools into one package for a premium, it’s interesting to note that Twitter hasn’t dabbled in the client space yet – is this somewhere where they’re far happier with 3rd parties competing with each other?

Theoretically it could be building itself up pre-sale, but given the potential of the service with the additional data it will now provide, this seems less likely.

What the new search functionality will mean is that linking from Twitter will suddently become a lot more important than the current traffic driving (as the links are designed no-follow at the moment), and for websites and blogs, perhaps the additional data will lead to various ranking systems placing a big value on Twitter presence.

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Filed Under: twitter Tagged With: bit.lt, data, follower emails, notificiations, short urls, twitter, twitter followers, twitter search, url shortner

Search Cloudlet adds tag cloud for Twitter users

March 23, 2009 By Dan Thornton Leave a Comment

If you use Firefox for web surfing and Twitter (I do!), then you might find Search Cloudlet is a useful plugin.

Search Cloudlet

It’s simple and effective to use – it inserts context-aware tag clouds in Google, Yahoo and Twitter pages.

Apparently the addition of Twitter was the suggestions of @cleverclogs, who suggested I give it a try. And having installed it, I now have a tag cloud on my Twitter home-page, plus search pages, profile pages, favorites and the public timeline.

You can click between the tag cloud for keywords, or, on Twitter, a tag cloud of @ replies, which is quite useful. And there’s a handy ‘Off’ option as well. You can also select to turn it off permanently on your own page, other profile pages, or on Twitter search.

To be honest, I don’t use it a lot – following 2000+ people means that I need more than a tag cloud for the latest page of updates to really look into the available data – but it can be quite handy for checking out who I’ve replied to recently, especially as a reminder if there’s a username I need to look up.

But it’s no hassle to have it turned to ‘Off’ for when I occasionally need it.

Have you used Search Cloudlet and found it useful?

And what Firefox Add-Ons would you recommend using with Twitter, or other microblogging platforms?

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Filed Under: Tools, twitter Tagged With: @replies, firefox, firefox addons, search cloudlet, tag cloud, tags, twitter, twitter search

What's happening with applications on Twitter?

January 22, 2009 By Dan Thornton Leave a Comment

There’s something about Twitter‘s recent decisions that just doesn’t make any sense to me at the moment.

It’s experiencing huge growth and celebrity adoption, it’s appearing in mainstream media (Even The Sun is carrying stories about Twitter), and it has some money in the bank.

But one of the big advantages of the Twitter model is that it can use the huge advantage of external developers and applications undertaking the risky part of establishing themselves before acquiring them or introducing something similar.

After all, Twitter acquired Summize to become Twitter Search.

But since then, things have been a little different. First Twitter acquired Values of n, the company behind Stikkit and I Want Sandy, with Rael Dornfest joining Twitter’s user experience group – and the former services being shut, which caused some outcry, and a group of developers to come together to create an open source version of Sandy.

Recently Twitter introduced a ‘suggested users‘ page for new registrations and alongside the options to find other members. Which seemed like a reasonable idea to encourage new users to start following and interacting with other members.

Sadly it’s rubbish. For two reasons.

There’s no relevancy. It’s offered to new users before they have filled in profile details or sent any messages, meaning thatthe suggestions have no context, and are pretty much useless. And although many people have said this could be the start of monetisation, how much money do irrelevant friend suggestions make?
There are far better options out there already. For new users with no context, why not simply let people take a look at relevant categories on Twitter user directory Twellow? And if you’re looking for relevant suggestions for people to follow, there’s already the totally awesome MrTweet. (Interview here)

The only time I've mentioned a whale, it had 'fail' in front of it!

Much better suggestions and information from MrTweet

And now there’s concern over the decision to limit API calls from applications. I’m not aware of how many calls are average, so take a look at Jesse Stay’s thoughts on the SocialToo blog, Mark Evans at Twitterati, or SocialToo advisor Louis Gray (Who very kindly recommended and linked to 140char today!)

The idea from Twitter’s perspective is to ensure reliability – which is certainly understandable giving the problems that sometimes occur – and the only services that aren’t viable any longer are those which notify you of people unfollowing, such as Qwitter (no longer with us) . But as Marshall Kirkpatrick writes at ReadWriteWeb, Twitter applications are developing incredibly fast and this could hurt anyone trying to offer something radically new. And as Rafe Needleman points out at Cnet, it seems very odd that Twitter hasn’t used this chance to partner with external developers.

On the bright side, the API limit should force more efficient use of the Twitter API, which will benefit everyone, and the Twitter Firehose and OAuth support are due within around a month.

Hopefully that will mean Twitter can stop worrying about the scalability and learn to love external applications again. Especially as they’re building financial models (e.g. Twittad and Magpie), and monetisable services (e.g. Stocktwit) which show where the cash is for Twitter without the internal team having to experiment at all.

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