Twitter has skyrocketed into mainstream with seemingly no meaning behind it. The simple application allowing everyone in the world to share what they’re doing, thinking, or feeling in 140 characters has grown into one of the most popular web 2.0 applications on the web, and it’s no doubt there are many apps on the web to accompany it. Although not affiliate with Twitter in any way, twtapps is a neat website that features some of the coolest web 2.0 applications that help businesses market on Twitter.
However as the site has grown, there have been ever more apps added for other popular social networking sites such as Facebook and Digg. I visit twtapps and was very impressed with the selection of apps, and also the quality of marketing you can perform with them. I got an interview with the site’s creator Felipe Coimbra, so enjoy the scoop on this hot new web 2.0 app!
What is the idea behind twtapps, and what does it allow it’s users to do?
Twtapps is a set of Social Media business applications that help you to engage with your customers and promote your business online. We currently have 10 applications, 6 of which are business related, so with them, our users can create polls, manage events, post job openings, manage online business cards and create / distribute online coupons.
What kind of market or niche would benefit most from your services?
Most of our applications have a tendency to be business oriented, however anybody looking into social media as a way to promote themselves, their business, or their product can benefit from using our applications. For example, if you have any fun questions or just want to start conversations with your followers, you can use Twtpoll to help compile all of their choices/comments.
Likewise, if you have service/product questions and you want to see what your customers think about it, you can also use Twtpoll. If you want to organize an informal get together to meet some of your followers face-to-face, you can use Twtvite. Likewise, if you’d like to organize network events or host events at your business, you can also use Twtvite. So, we provide several tools and we let our users decide how they can be used to achieve their goals.
How did the idea for twtapps come about, and what were the early development days like?
Like Twitter, Twtapps was a side project. I had been working on a travel social network for a little over a year (YowTRIP). Prior to starting Twtapps, I had been solely focusing on YowTRIP and I had started using Twitter as a marketing tool for it. I was trying to find a good way to easily poll my followers and compile their votes. I noticed there wasn’t any real good way to do it and that many people had been simply shouting out random questions and manually compiling the answers.
I developed Twtpoll and on the next day it was featured on TechCrunch. Two weeks later I had more visitors than for 1 year on my other site. So, I decided to put my travel site on hold and see where twtpoll could go. Twtvite was the next one and I have been developing applications at a rate of 2 apps per month.
I saw that twtapps is built in PHP. Was there a reason for this, or was this just something chosen without any real meaning?
I have been developing in PHP for a long time, so it was just the language I was most familiar with.
The design of twtapps is very simplistic, easy to navigate, and definitely straight to the point. How was the site’s design chosen and created?
Twtapps is based on Twitter and Twitter is a very simple platform, so in order to be effective, the functionality and design of all our applications had to follow the same philosophy: single function and very simple user interface.
About how many people visit twtapps actively?
It depends on the application. Our most popular ones are Twtpoll, Twtvite, TwtBizCard, with 10K, 3K, 1K daily uniques respectively. Twtapps servers as a hub for people who are more curious about the business itself and it gets about 500 visits daily.
What is your favorite social networking / social bookmarking site and why?
You go to the social network site where most of your friends are. I’m from Brazil, so I use Orkut to connect with old friends there and I lived in the US for many year, so everyone else is on Facebook. In terms of my favorite, besides Twitter 😉 I used Meetup.com a lot. I prefer sites where you can actually do something offline and meet people face-to-face (and that’s where I was going with YowTRIP).
If you had any advice for someone starting their own web 2.0 website, what would it be?
Do it and release it as fast as you can. Don’t be afraid to share your ideas, chances are that there are already a lot of people working on it, so the fastest you validate your idea (and fail), the better off you are.
And lastly, think about leveraging existing communities instead of trying to build one.
