I'm a heavy Twitter user, and marketer, and use and love Hootsuite.

I just signed up, created one filter and one folder, so haven't spent a ton of time, but here's some initial feedback:

What problem are you trying to solve exactly? Your homepage says "easy Twitter filtering" yet the set up seems a bit complicated. Basically, from what I gather is you're another twitter client competing with Hootsuite, Tweetbot, Tweetdeck - all of which offer tweet filtering - so what is your key differentiator?

I think you're missing a differentiator - I can't find anything with your app that I can't already do with Hootsuite, so what would make me want to use TweetDig instead?

From a UX perspective, I would put Folder/Filter editing directly from the dashboard - an "Add Filter" button on the left side, and Edit option for existing filters (on hover, click, etc..) I had to search to find where to add/edit, and if your user's primary objective is filtering tweets, the ability to add/edit/manage filters should be much more prominent than buried under "Configuration".

You might want to consider looking at "Smarter filtering" with some natural language processing, machine learning, etc...

My biggest problem with saved searches and filters that I use is that often I'll get irrelevant stuff that clogs up those streams but does in fact match my criteria - I would see a ton of value in a twitter client where you can filter smarter - let me "ignore tweets in this 'filter' from this user", etc.. and go beyond simply matching criteria, to curate based on stuff I retweet, stuff I tweet, hashtags I use, etc...

My advice would be to focus on these things:

1. The ultimate problem you are trying to solve, and who has this problem? Find out what's most valuable to them in a solution. 2. User experience (not how pretty the UI is) but put yourself in your users' shoes, and do a walkthrough of your app. What is the objective your user is trying to achieve when they use your app, and are you making it as simple as possible for them to achieve that objective.

Best of luck!

Unforunately, the filter set up is something that we're struggling to simplify.

Hootsuite, Tweetbot etc offer searching and muting based on tweet content. Tweetdig offers the ability to filter based on a wide range of criteria (such as filtering out tweets from a specific user like you mentioned). That's our differentiating factor.

Thanks for the comments on hiding add/edit/manage under configuration. We'll take a look at where we could fit them into the interface.

We're very interested in the user experience, and we've improved it a lot over the last few weeks. It still needs a lot of work, but we're finding that the first thing new users see is the design. I think to get them past that, we need to take a look at the UI. People don't seem willing to give things a try if it doesn't look pretty, no matter how easy it is to use.

Hootsuite is not a pretty UI :)

So, isn't your filtering out a user the same as muting a user?

I just realized you can add multiple criteria (i.e. From X user, and Y keyword) ... that is valuable. I didn't realize you could do that. (Psssst - see, UX!) :)

I realize people want something pretty, and yes it's enticing but your question was why are people saying they love the idea, then signing up and not coming back. Do you have any user engagement metrics set up (using something like Mixtab) to see where the drop off happens? If you're seeing user growht, but low engagement it could be that the UX is not delivering on the value proposition.

Maybe get some friends/family who use twitter alot to sign up and give step by step feedback along the process and do some customer interviews.

We don't filter anything out, as that's against Twitter's ToS. We do however facilitate sending all tweets from a user into a folder you define. You can of course decide not to read that folder :)

The UX on creating filters needs work, I agree. You can make filters as complicated as you like! e.g. "Any links tweeted by @tweetdigapp with the hashtag #opensource".

We have metric tracking for most user actions. Home rolled though, and I've not heard of Mixtab. Will take a look at them, thanks.

1) Change your name. Tweet + Digg sounds like a social media parody. Also, I don't think you can use the word "tweet" in your name without risking being sued by Twitter. And, if you grow, you may expand beyond filtering Tweets.

2) Your audience and customers are people that use Twitter for business - small businesses, marketing departments, ad agencies, etc. Take a look at other firms in that space (SEOMoz, Buddy Media, HootSuite and see how they do things. Right now your language is geared towards consumers that like Twitter. Change that. Your website needs to explain to a small business how you can help them make more money.

3) It IS a good idea. Social media filtering is a big problem. You are just selling it to the wrong people.

As far as I know using "Tweet" in your name isn't too big an issue (look at Tweetdeck pre-acquisition). Based on how Twitter have been tightening the rules on how we use their platform recently though, it might be something to look at.

Our target audience at the moment is power users who would give us constructive criticism. We thought that any businesses would be reluctant to give us a go whilst things are changing so rapidly. This thread is giving us a reason to rethink that decision though.

Thanks for the reassurance!

Hey - was in your beta when it first came out - tried it once and then didn't go back. To me it just wasn't instantly gratifying - too much setting up to do before it got compelling.

Happy to give it another go because it's been quite a while but: 1) Where did the sexy interface go? http://dribbble.com/prmack/projects/16669-Tweetdig 2) Nothing's happening when I click around.

Hi Jon, thanks for giving us a go back when we started!

We had a lot of people saying that the initial setup was too much, so we've tried to make it a bit easier by providing suggested filters and back filling with data so there's something to see straight away.

With regards to the previous interface, people just couldn't work out how to use it. We did some real life user tests and they couldn't do simple tasks such as create a folder. The new interface, whilst not as nice to look at, is much more usable by end users we've found.

It looks pretty interesting (I have a twitter account but barely use it, if ever).

What are the costs involved for the end user? Is it free? If so, tell them.

Consider your filter tweets section from an adoption standpoint:

Create filters to automatically move Tweets to folders, and reduce Twitter noise. Tweets can be filtered based on hashtags, URLs, Tweet content and author - or any combination of these.

1. I wouldn't recommend using the name 'folders'. Tweets aren't synonymous with letters (that go into folders), tweets are more like sticky notes. I'd suggest you think of a new name to call the tweet containers.

2. You first talk about moving tweets into folders and then about filtering them. (I think you are implying that you filter tweets into these 'folders'). You should use easier to understand terms such as 'Sort tweets from those who you are following into ...'. Use comparisons to simplify the explanation.

3. Provide sensible defaults or provide a sensible way to get users started. (ex. type in the twitter handle/username from your favourite tweeter). A demo is a good idea, but there should definitely also be an easy way to get started.

4. Market yourself effectively. From what I see on your website, it seems like the website is a twitter client - but I'm not sure. If it is a client, then say so. (You have to tell people what you want them to use your service for).

Some of the above recommendations simply require rewriting your copy (text on website). I have also suggested some options that will require hiring a developer. I reckon the best measure to use here is: if your mother uses twitter, will you be able to sit her down and will she be a 'self-starter' using your website or will you have to hold her hand? Try it. She'll definitely give you some useful input.:)

It's free for 1 Twitter account and up to 8 filters. After that, there's an annual payment of $20 for 3 accounts and 15 filters, or a $10 monthly for 10 accounts and 40 filters.

Thanks for the feedback about the copy. We're both developers which makes implementing features easy, but explaining how they work quite hard. We definitely need to take a look at the copy + add a demo of how things work. Just got to find a way to do it properly on a budget :)

I rarely use twitter; I've made concerted efforts but I mostly find the SNR is too high. I looked at your front page but didn't find it compelling.

1. I don't want to filter noise to folders, I want to skip it entirely. 2. I could care less about "losing" or missing a tweet. If there's something important, I'll get an email. If there's something truly compelling to read about, there will be multiple chances for me to see a relevant tweet. 3. A successful pitch to me would be something along the lines of removing the noise so that I'm getting almost pure signal. 4. What is it that I'm getting? Is it web-based, is it an app that runs on a smart phone (which I don't own), desktop (which platform?), something else? 5. Your blog entries go from 8 May to 13 Aug. Your twitter account has a lot of gaps too. I totally understand how hard it is to keep up with this stuff (I'm guilty of this too), but it makes me not want to invest too much time into something that you aren't necessarily fully invested in.

If we were to filter out any content, we would be breaking the agreement we made with Twitter when we started developing on top of their platform and they could revoke our access.

Thanks for the tip about pitching. The copy on the site needs work, so we'll be sure to make sure it explains exactly what Tweetdig is and what it does.

Our blog and twitter account is a bit neglected, but we feel that our time is better spent improving the product than writing blog posts. If anything, I'd say that shows that we're even more invested than if the blog + Twitter were very busy. If we were to spend more time on the social side of things, what would you like to see us do?

Re filtering: I guess from my perspective, all I'd really want is a binary filter with two "folders": worth-reading and crap. I'd never look at the crap folder, but you could still say you're presenting me all of the tweets.

Re social: Again, I fully understand where you're coming from. It's a hard thing to balance. Surely in the 3 months of no blog posts, though, there must have been something new you added that would have been worth blogging? It doesn't have to be earth-shattering news, maybe just show some signs of life. Maybe spend 20 minutes every Friday afternoon to mention what's new that week? Maybe tweet one or two things every morning about something semi-related to your service.

You're well within your rights to send tweets to a folder but never read them :)

Things do happen! Unfortunately most of what we do is technical, and our (perceived) target market doesn't really care about that side of things. I'm sure we can find one thing a week to say though.

Your link to TheNextWeb also makes me realized that you don't show pricing on your front page.

Also, realizing that I'd have to create rules for the filters is a downer. I was hoping for some kind of machine learning that does the opposite of spam filtering. (I guess that's what I really want -- a "ham" filter for twitter.)

Both of these points have been made elsewhere in the thread, so we should take a look at them. Unfortunately, machine learning isn't as good as users explicitly saying what they want to see (and not nearly as easy to implement either!)

As for pricing, our rationale is that a user shouldn't have to think about pricing unless they get to the stage that they need to pay, and are sufficiently invested in the product.

I like it. It would be something I could see myself using, but I don't see myself taking the time to set it up. In your early experiments, who did you discover your target market to be. Remember signing up isn't enough of a hurdle to really determine your target market.

My first thought is, I don't see the pricing page. To me this is a service a marketing department or agency would use. That being said I don't think being free is the right choice.

I would try to find a few agencies who manage social media campaigns and a few social media managers for a brand. Set your price, help them setup their account and keep in close contact with them. Kind of a modified concierge MVP. I would not got free for them. Make sure they have some skin in the game, so they will give you honest feedback, and have more incentive to collect ROI from the service.

It's interesting that you mentioned the set up time. We've added some suggested filters for things like links, retweets and videos and they seem to be quite popular. We've got to find a way to find it easier to let people create more specific filters easily.

So far, the majority of people that have signed up are personal users with a handful of personal accounts. Agencies are a potential audience, but most aren't willing to give us a chance whilst we're under such heavy development.

We made a conscious choice not to show the pricing page until the user needs to pay. We hoped by the point they needed to see the payment page they'd be sufficiently invested in the product. Unfortunately, a lot of people don't get that far.

A concierge MVP sounds like a good idea, and is something I'll look in to. Thanks for the suggestion :)

I'm not an avid Twitter user and this is only my personal impression rather than a guess why anybody else might be abandoning your app. That said:

Initially the idea of filtered tweets seemed compelling. I think everyone has that one spammy friend who they only follow because unfollowing would be impolite. But soon after signing up I realized that it's simply too much work to be worth it: not your app specifically, but using a separate client and having to come up with filters. Filtering and organizing is simply not natural for Twitter - it's meant to be a continuous stream where missing something is no big deal. I could possibly use filtering if it was in a form of a browser plugin (so I could still use twitter.com) and had just one option - to suppress tweets from a specific account.

Unforunately, as we're a platform and not an addon we have to provide a separate interface for the app.

In reply to Twitter being a continuous stream, that is how some people (yourself included) use Twitter. Other people (such as myself) use it differently. I use it personally to keep up to date with tech developments (using a Github filter) and to get rid of things I don't want to see (e.g. filtering out #xfactor). Every person is different though, and unfortunately it seems like Tweetdig would be overkill for what you'd use it for.

The app is definitely useful for people who listen to twitter for marketing/customer support purposes. Your target user is probably someone who is using Tweetdeck or Hootsuite, rather than a casual user.

But then, both Tweetdeck and Hootsuite have similar functionality available. And they are very popular among prosumers and people who use Twitter for their work.

Probably the way to go for you guys would be to allow building some kind of custom search folders for Twitter, which people can then share. You can become a site where people come to discover the most interesting content from Twitter, curated by the people using the tools that you already have built.

Hope that makes sense.

Social custom search folders is an angle that we hadn't considered. It's been mentioned somewhere else in this thread too, so it's definitely something to think about. Thanks!

We've been aiming at the power user market for now, trying to get people who can offer constructive criticism as a user. Everyone's saying to focus on the business market though, so we might have to change our focus on that one.

Thanks for the reassurance that we're doing the right thing! Hopefully we'll be able to sell it to the right people soon

Is your app social? Can users share their folders with other users? How often are you notifying your users via email of new features, reminders, etc?

It's not social at all at the minute. Sharing folders between users is an idea we've been discussing, but nothing's come of it yet.

We email users every time there is a large update to the site with a fairly high open rate. However, not many of them return to give us another go.

Would it make sense to send a reminder to users stating something to the effect of "you have 200 new tweets that need to categorized?"

We could do that. As a user, would you personally find that useful or would you class it as spam?

Try it one week and see how many people unsubscribe. Our team is also very critical of email notifications so we try to think like normal users. As long as you make the email insightful or interesting, users wont mind.

A great v2.0 feature would be to use NLP and automatically tag and filter the user's tweets. It would be hard feature to pull off but it would take your product to the next level.

Can you kill the landing page? Maybe users would like to browse other user's folders and discover now content.

Also make the Sign in with Twitter much more prominent.

Short video intro, showing the app in action. Show me how it will make my life easier.

The sign in with twitter was more prominent but we actively took attention away from it so that people would see the sign up with an email address first. By enabling sign in with Twitter, we lose a communication channel that we could be using.

Would you say that losing a user's email address is worth it to make the chances they'll sign up higher?

You can let them signup with their twitter account, but then prompt them for their email address. Almost like a 2 stage signup. Best of both worlds. Click a button to sign in with twitter, enter your email address and get started.

If you expand to facebook let me know. I would love to filter out the spam from my family members about MLM crap. :D

We did actually consider prompting for an email address once they sign up with Twitter. However, whenever I've used an app that does that to me I just leave the site and don't go back and thought that if I didn't like it happening to me, it wouldn't be fair to do it to others.

Have you tried asking your users? Because they'll probably be only too happy to tell you.

We have. My co-founder emailed each person individually and a large majority of them simply ignored the email. :(

Yeah, as users we're always in survey overload and I've started to resent them. You go to a news site and an ugly popup asks you to take a survey. Or you call a service hotline and they want you to rate their service. You watch a netflix video and they want to know your experiences. Too much.

Maybe you can add analytics to mine this information. Maybe start a feedback/help/support forum. Those seem less spammy and offer real help and gives you insight into feature requests and pain points.