Understand Your Niche

We recently found out about http://twaitter.com, a full-service web based twitter scheduling solution, currently in Alpha. Here is our initial evaluation of the service:

• Twaitter’s set up is straightforward; if you have a Twitter account, you already have a Twaitter account also.
• The multi-page multi-pane user interface is fast, easy to use and intuitive — A+ for CHI design. Some small glitches remain, which is expected since the service is in Alpha.
• The UI actually is a complete web-based Twitter interface, you can use it for all your interactions with Twitter.
• The functionality is organized into five pages, Account Home, Calendar, Scheduled Tweets, Feed Manager, and Settings. I’ll let you explore these pages for yourself, each one contains about what you’d expect.
• Scheduling facilities are *very* complete: you can schedule a tweet for a certain time in the future, or on a repeating schedule. You cannot schedule a specific tweet for more than once a day, but this is easy to get around by scheduling another tweet on the same daily schedule but at a different time. There does not seem to be a limit on how many tweets you can schedule or for how far into the future you can schedule a tweet.
• We were unable to figure out how to edit already-scheduled tweets. It seems that, at least at this early time in the life of Twaitter, this is not possible — you have to delete the scheduled tweet and reenter it with the modified information. There’s also no way at present to clone an already-scheduled tweet.
• There’s various small bugs as you’d expect from an Alpha-stage web application; for example, tweets scheduled recurring from today but at a later time than now actually only start tomorrow. The service also  seems to allow you to schedule a tweet for an already-expired time, without warning; at least, it did not warn us. And there are small glitches in the user interface such as buttons hidden by other elements, etc. I am certain that these issues will be fixed by the developers, who are very easy to get a hold of and eager for all feedback, both positive and negative.

Overall Verdict: This looks like the ultimate tweet scheduler. The developers are engaged and eager to fix the current problems and they are very happy to take input and comments, which is all a very good sign. I’d be willing to pay for such a service, if they decide to charge for a premium service, to support the features it provides. Clearly some kind of monetization will be necessary, since the service needs dedicated web servers to run, and must scale with use. It will be interesting to see how Twaitter.com will address this.