Twollo – hear from the creator: what is it and is it worth using?

I recently got a chance to check out one of the newest twitter apps – Twollo – as well as speak with the creator, Paul Kinlan. He and I took our conversation out of the 140 character atmosphere, and chatted via email. I asked him a few questions about why he created twollo, the goal of the site and where he saw it going. Below is the information he gave me about his new site:

KW: Why did you start Twollo?

PK: I started Twollo because I needed to expand the twitter network that I was in. I was getting to the point where I was getting bored ( for want of a better word) and I knew that there must be thousands of user out there with interests that are similar to mine. I am a big fan of automation so I thought I should create a service that follows people for me whilst i am a sleep, at work etc.

I did some “Market research” and didn’t find anything that could do what I wanted. Obviously I am not good at Market research because there is a service with nearly exactly the same name doing a similar thing (but it costs money for the comparative service).

KW: So what were you doing beforetwollo?

PK: I run a company called topicala ltd (it is just me) that was originally based around a simple meta search engine at www.topicala.com after experiencing scalability problems I investigated the Google App Engine and have now developed lots of services on this; mainly www.eweri.com, www.atopical.com, www.thecompanything.com, www.thetopicthing.com, some others I can’t mention yet and now www.Twollo.com

KW: Where do you see this site going? and do you plan on making any big changes to it overall?

PK: Twollo itself is not very complex, the suggestion engine is very simple and I plan to keep it that way. One of the places that I see twollo going is that I now have a lot of information with regards to the interests of twitter/twollo users so the future will be less about mining twitter for data and more about connecting users through twollo directly.

Twollo is all about finding and following the conversations about which you are interested, and from that perspective I am the same I want twollo to grow and the only way that this can happen is if I am very active in conversation about twollo, which is why I am quite vocal on twitter at the moment.
Paul continued to say that he is always open for suggestions – and the best way to find out what is going on with Twollo is to follow him @twollo

For those of you who haven’t checked it out – here is my brief review of the site (both the good and the bad). Feel free to let me know what you thought as well!

1. The site is well organized and it is easy to see what is going on and the users it is finding for you. But, the UI could be a little wider, and possibly customizable for the user.

2. The name is quite cute – and fairly easy to remember (although there are about a million Tw— sites out there now…). The logo is great but I wonder about the rights to use the twitter bird?

3. It definitely gives you some quality people to follow – I have found some great new people in the niches that I am interested in. But, I would love to see a prequalification that he tweeters have made at least 100 updates and have 15 followers themselves. This might help eliminate a few of the spammers.

4. You get to fully customize your results, as narrow or as broad as you would like. I chose creative marketing as my tag, as well as my own twitter name – @kirstenwright, and the common misspelling -@kRistenwright (it helps as I missed a few new people who had responded to earlier tweets of mine)

5. As far as the autofollow – you can set it to find 10, 20, 50, etc people each day. If you set it low, the number of new followers really isn’t too much to check.

Overall – definitely worth checking out. You’ll never know who you meet until you try it

Finally, thanks to Paul Kinlan for his time.

Related posts:

1. Words and phrases we should never hear again
2. Are your followers worth following?
3. Art worth asking for