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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.