@jamie: Every time someone tweets using agtweet, the word ‘ag tweet’ appears in their feed on the web. That is 30,000 odd thousand tweets x however many times read their tweets online. I was hocking the ‘naming rights’ so some brand could have their name appear here. The name can be changed so you could in effect use it as a micro-marketing tool. That was the pitch I was making anyway. Also, people save the agtweet number in their phone. I was pitching the fact that this name would be saved into each person’s phone eg: I was selling ad space in peoples phone directory. I’ll update the post with the original PPT I used in the pitch.

I have to say that I’ve bought at least 2 twitter clients. I don’t think its a case of ‘no one’ buying clients – more a case of ‘what percentage’ would buy. Either way though, there is clearly no business here in selling access to the service. That’s why I was going for another ’sponsorship’ route.

The problem is that it suffers from the worst problems of an SMS service and a Twitter client. SMS services are by their nature interacted with via 140 char messages – there really isn’t a lot of options for branding, advertising or sponsorship (for example, I visited the AgTweet website once to sign up and never again). Also, why would I pay for AgTweet which I use once or twice a month when the actual SMS messages are free from my operator <— I think that is another general perceptual problem with SMS services.

The problem with Twitter clients in general is that no one pays for them. Is there a single successful monetized Twitter client? I can't even think of one that charges, successful or not! For example, I've developed a prototype Twitter client for summarising Twitter streams and extracting interesting links & tweets, whilst discarding the chaff. As useful as this might be, it will require significant time/computing resources and has no viable business model. So it'll stay at the prototype stage.

AgTweet is a fantastic utility (one which Twitter should have kept providing themselves) but it isn't a viable business. Just my 2c.

I’m not worried about replies. I can get them at my PC.

agtweet has been great. I love it. But, I guess, if it’s working out, it’s just not working out.

Thanks for trying, however. Really. It’s been a blast.