Why Tweetglide Matters – seriously

Andy Beard — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 04:45:16 +0000

When Mike Filsaime first mentioned Tweetglide, I signed up to his notification list but I wasn’t really that interested in the concept. I thought it had a few flaws in the business model he was proposing, and there were already enough Adobe Air Twitter applications on the market.

I am saying this as someone who even considered hiring some developers to make an app, or picking up a dying project and adding some viral life to it. There are ways to leverage the Twitter application market that will be attractive.

Before Mike really started selling information products, he had a huge amount of success with viral marketing applications many of which are still alive and generating revenue and traffic 4 years later.

See that second bar? Those are paid ads, though the more real tweets you post, the more ad credits you earn, but the amount you can earn is limited to 1 ad credit every 3 hours.
That is there for a reason – advertising is meant to be valuable.

The aim is also to clean up the Twitter stream that is currently plagued with people promoting stuff, especially marketers. Permission to see an agreed amount of advertising is a much better alternative, and if Mike has got his math right, lots of people will see those adverts.

Advertising is relatively cheap depending on how many see your advert and click – too many factors to speculate on now – I know I have got a ton of advertising credits to use from paid upgrades – Tweetglide is something I willingly paid to upgrade just to check it out.

Serious reasons to use Tweetglide

Take a look at my Tweetglide blog – Andy Beard on Tweetglide

It doesn’t look very special at this time, very much like your normal Twitter page

However Tweetglide isn’t a black hole of link equity – no link condoms.

At the same time there is no enforced blogroll – just because I follow someone doesn’t make it an endorsement, whereas normally when I link from Twitter it is an endorsement – that strange parallel of Twitter I have never been comfortable with – it has sucked for too long.

Tweetglide also supports long length tweets over 140 characters – they need a little bit of improving, but if you just have something quick to say, it is useful.

SEO By Andy Beard

Well kind of….

Over the weekend I exchanged a lot of long emails with Mike over the SEO shortcomings – I can see his team have already picked up a lot of what I suggested in just the rushed 2 days before launch, and my hope is that they will implement the whole of my “12 point list” of major structural changes to the site.

There are a few more tweaks I could add to the list, and as the site settles down I will add those to the suggestions.

I am probably too modest about my achievements with SEO and large user generated content sites, but as of yesterday I am pretty sure I will now helped 2 sites reached the Alexa Top 500 from modest beginnings, and it would be great to make Tweetglide a hat-trick.

The roadmap Mike now has for Tweetglide will make the blogs valuable properties with a flat architecture ideal for deep indexing – this is important as a lot of the information within the extended 140+ Tweets would otherwise just disappear.

As a property for reputation management, Tweetglide is going to rock – if nurtured correctly I am quietly confident it can replace Twitter in my own SERPs.

Serious Flexibility

I just spent 5 minutes on some obvious customization that isn’t possible with your normal Twitter page, I am sure there are a bunch more possibilities.

So there is a bunch of javascript widgets, static links with anchor text or call to action.

I bet I can get an autoresponder in there no problem

Popups? Exitpops? No idea, but seems like fun.

I have no idea how secure this is… Blogger has somehow been able to allow all these things for years, for some reason WP.com can’t handle it, but you would think the team who created blogger, who now work on Twitter would be able to add a little more flexibility.

Tracking?

This says it all

Monetization?

I haven’t tried, but I bet all kinds of advertising widgets plus Google Adsense will work.

No Custom CSS

This is all new, I am sure lots more flexibility will come for custom designs

Big Negative

Whilst I have been assured this is going to be fixed soon, currently Mike has Viral Inviter on the back end. I know Mike has taken action to nudge the devleoper over the issues, and Norman dropped by and left a comment yesterday to go over viral inviter new features.
I would suggest not using the tell-a-friend for now… Mike does have a large development team but this site is beta, going to be gaining a lot of attention, and any risk with a Gmail password is too much…

The rest of the site? Seriously much better than I expected, with a lot more long-term potential.

This is a referral link Andy Beard’s Referral Link and I think other links to the blog will count as that as well, and even search engine traffic.
I did encourage Mike to make everything “coupon” based just like all the web2.0 startups but the links are referral links for now.

Tags: adobe air, app, tweetglide, twitter

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