Interviewing the real MrTweet - Steve Ng Ming Yeow
Dan Thornton | December 8, 2008One of the Twitter applications which has received a lot of responses is MrTweet, billed as ‘Your Personal Networking Assistant’. Follow @MrTweet and you’ll get a direct message when he’s ready to help. And you’ll then get a list of the followers you should really have followed back, but may have missed - and a list of people outside of your network who are relevant and worth following - and you also get a character profile with information on each person to help you decide.
I got in touch with @MIngYeow - one of the duo behind MrTweet, along with @ambivalence, to find out more, particularly as the service received a lot of negative comments about some functionality which initially required submitting your Twitter username - there’s no need to submit your username for the applications now!
What inspired you to create MrTweet? Is it just one part of your social start-up?
You know you need a personal assistant when you are spending more time searching for the right people, as opposed to being able to build effective relationships through sharing and communicating.
The simplicity and openness of Twitter has become a limiting factor, as sheer information overload overwhelms users. In many cases, folks resorted to randomly surfing and adding.
Based on these needs and existing behaviors, rose the inspiration of Mr. Tweet - a personal assistant of helping users find good people to connect to easily.
Mr. Tweet is a first step of our social startup, which hopefully you will hear a lot more about in time to come.
Was it a reaction to directory-based services like Twellow, Twitterpacks or TwitDir?
Nope, we respect what they do a lot. Frankly speaking, we serve very different needs. We are focused on “personalization”. which is a completely different ball game from directories
You seemed to have been singled out from all of the applications that require a user’s Twitter login - why is that? And how did you feel about being the one service singled out for the criticism, when so many have been accepted without question?
Well, we only require the user’s password if he wants to follow people through our interface, and there really is no alternative there.
To answer your question, I actually feel that it is great that we are stirring up discussion on this very important topic. Twitterrank started the buzz with their demonstration app. and we followed right after them.
The open authentication (OAuth, OpenID) has been pushing Twitter to use OAuth for a while now, and it looks like it might really happen.
The About page for the company you’ve started behind MrTweet, Discover.io mentions a Facebook application, Fluidity, rather than MrTweet - did your plans change to focus on Twitter first, and was there a reason for that?
Yup, we did. Facebook is a great platform, but apps that focus on value add rather than “social for the sake of social’ do not do well there.
Twitter users have a far far higher appreciation for apps that are trying too add value.
You (Ming) have experience in Venture Capital and Product Management - does this mean you have a business strategy behind MrTweet specifically? Will it always remain a free service for users?
It will always remain a free service. We will be implementing more and more ways of delivering continuous value to users, and make it into a sustainable business at some point.
Initially there was a bug with people with over 500 followers (Or was it following over 500?). Has this now been solved?
Yuppy. Although significant problems remain in keeping following lists 100% synchronized.
Have there been any other issues so far which have surprised you?
I hate to say this, but I do wish that the Twitter platform can be slightly more stable. Obviously I love them, but minor glitches on their end can throw our plans off.
Oh, anything. Robert Scoble crashing us. We still cannot take him
You’ve said on the MrTweet blog there have been a lot of suggestions for more features e.g. user statistics, or UI improvements - are there any more you can reveal will be implemented in the short term?
UI and performance issues will be worked on in the short term. Also working on ranking improvements based on feedback.
You’ve also revealed on the blog that you’ve spent a week focusing on scaling the service - how effectively is word of MrTweet spreading? Have you publicised it anywhere other than within Twitter?
WOM has been extremely effective. It is our sole form of marketing. There has been about 30 blog postings on Mr Tweet done so far, and those drove users as well.- Comments
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