Ask HN: Please review my site http://tweetingmachine.com | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Please review my site http://tweetingmachine.com

5 pointsmootothemax20 comments

TweetingMachine has been my weekend project, mostly to learn Twitter's API after some previous freelance requirements.

It's a crowded marketplace, but there seem to be enough people out there wanting to use such tools; do you think there's room for me if I keep adding more features?

http://tweetingmachine.com

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There is always room for more, HN has taught me that.

Nice work for a weekend product. How does your system handle spam? e.g. if I schedule a tweet every 1 second to 20 accounts that may get your oAuth or ip blacklisted from Twitter.

I could only see what the Pro cost is very small at the bottom of the screen. You should make your pricing structure more obvious, and I would like to select which version im signing up for before I sign up for it.

Right now I handle spam by not having a recurring tweeting function ;) You have to manually send each tweet, however that's not to say someone determined (not to mention, also very bored) couldn't sit there constantly hitting the send button. I'll look in to this.

I'm going to play around with where else to put the price as you're right, it's a bit hidden at the moment.

Currently, the only way to pay is to log in with a Twitter account first and then upgrade from there. I'm thinking about an option to "sign up for premium" where after signing in with Twitter the user's taken to a payment page. Do you think that'd be a good idea?

But I can schedule tweets right? How does this work?

I suspect his application saves the datetime of when the tweet is to be made and simply submits it at that given time.

Got it in one, although before a user can schedule tweets they have to tell us what their local timezone is. So that, plus some funky timezone fun inbetween :)

You can :) You set a date and time for a tweet to be sent (as well as which Twitter accounts for it to be sent across), and then TweetingMachine waits until that time to send it to Twitter. Job done!

Yes, I do. So If you allowed me to click the option I wanted (e.g. free or pro) then you could record that selection as session data in your web app, then take me to the Twitter page.

Then like you say, take me down a altered registration path if I chose pro.

I'm going to get on and do this, thanks for the suggestion :-)

you're welcome.

I am currently working on my own Tweet Suite, shall have to let you know when it's ready so you can repay the favour ;)

Since the marketplace is crowded with free tools, why don't you just sell a pro version? It will differentiate you and make you focus on making something worth paying for. Please don't hide that cost at the bottom of the page. Put it on top, make a video to tell me why I really really need to buy this beautiful thing.

Those are good points, thank you. I hadn't considered going pro-only, as I'd thought users might like to play with the system first before paying and this might get more signups. Hmm... I'm tempted to do an a/b split test and see...

I'm going to make the pricing more obvious, and will knock up a features video at the top as well.

The most important question is: do you want users or customers? You may be trying to be benevolent by giving away your work for free, but don't forget that making money enables you to be more benevolent in the long run.

</mega visionary sound bytes>

Right, I'm sold, Pro-only it is! I think I might do some coding tonight... :)

Awesome! By the way, how are you finding Poland?

Poland rocks and I love it here, although the language is still breaking my head on a regular basis ;)

That's great. I can imagine the language must take time to get used to. Good luck with TweetingMachine, I just signed up for the free version. Looking forward to being asked to upgrade :-P

The good thing about models like this is they're easy to scale, and they're relatively low maintenance.

You could get rid of free accounts, and only offer Pro accounts with a 2 week free trial (pending payment w/ cancellation at end of term).

You're now the second person to mention only offering Pro accounts, I think this might be the way forwards :)

You're falling in the same trap all other tweet scheduling services are falling into: I have to explicitly state when I want each tweet to be sent. Here's my dream tweet app (running from the command line):

username:~ machine$ schedule_tweets textfile_with_tweets_one_per_line X

X is the time interval at which I want the tweets to run.

Basically what I want is a service where I can add tweets to a queue, set it to 'post one tweet per hour' and let it run ...

I'm on the verge of adding a similar service: enter as many tweets as you fancy, and then select the interval between each tweet. Would that be something you'd be interested in? For that matter, it wouldn't be a pain to offer a CSV-style upload option either.

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