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Ask HN: Please review my startup.

twittewittewit.com

26 pointsmixmax20 comments

Love it!

But I would be afraid that somebody will figure out how to make a 13 character only twitter clone. This is a race that you can not win. Sooner or later some genius will make a service that allows you to broadcast nothing at all. Probably this service would even be free!1!.. killing all the other services in no time.

You can't get great status updates in 13 characters!

There's also the problem of availability of unique status updates, the lower your character count the fewer unique status updates there will be. If you launch a service with only 1 character there will only be 25 possible status updates.

People want to be unique, but they're also lazy, so it's a compromise between the two. I think 14 characters strikes the balance.

25? Is that a typo or have I missed something?

Anyway, what's wrong with using numbers? Upper and lowercase? Unicode?

Damn phone, small keys big thumbs. I shall make amends for this terrible down voting accident post haste (can't seem to fix it).

That's a very good point. But the scalability issues are easier to adress when you approach zero characters.

Hmmmmm, very nice concept. Have you thought about how you are going to deal with scalability and monetising issues?

I'm going to get both of them in one shot:

The hard thing about scaling a service like this is the social graph, AKA. when users have a lot of followers. So I'm going to use the freemium model and let users follow 10 or 20 people for free, and then start charging.

That way I'll start making money at the same time I have scaling problems.

Nice. I love how open you are about your plans. Thanks so much for sharing all this with us. Do you have a blog?

Oh by the way, shouldn't you charge for being followed rather than following?

Will you give me a free premium account if I write an ebook about your app?

Sure, I'll give a free premium account to anyone on HN that asks. I have a blog over at http://www.maximise.dk/blog but it's boring and there are definitely no posts that are only 14 characters.

Haahahhaha, awesome one mixmax. I'm a fan of your well timed launch :)

Sorry for breaking it, but you really should make sure you convert special characters to HTML entities.

Oopps.

I should have read this article before submitting: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html

What's the monetization strategy??

Not quite sure yet, but neither is Twitter and it doesn't seem to stop them. The about page addresses the subject briefly: http://twittewittewit.com/about.php

It was working earlier but now I'm getting a "Fail Guppy".

Do you support location information, too?

Not yet unfortunately - launch early and launch often.

Holy s* a html wall of text!

In a word, "am

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