How does Twicsy do revenue wise? I would love to hear the story behind it and how you got to that many users.
As for the story:
I launched it back in 2009 as a last ditch effort to save my company (Searchles) and was featured on TechCrunch a few times that first week. But, since then, the coverage has been almost nonexistent. I have relied on organic growth, SEO, and old fashioned, bullheaded persistence since then. It has grown about 5x each of the past 3 years.
I have been running it in my spare time since March of 2010, and I am not the world's greatest web developer, so almost all improvements have been on the back end just trying to scale the site.
If you are interested in the tech: I run MySQL on a 2TB SSD RAID 5 array, but then I use data caching servers I developed myself to speed up serving the site (some data in memory, most on SSD). The near real time search was also developed by me. Only 4 total servers are used to run the site.
Would it hurt your traffic too much to not have it displayed so prominently on the front page?
I tried some searches on imgur and nothing nasty comes up. On Twicsy it is very easy to get nasty stuff to appear.
Looks like imgur uses Google Adsense, they have cut me off several times.
Maybe you need to do the same thing: set up an "un-affiliated" website that allows you find all the 18+ content on Twicsy, haha
If you could find any feature at all to charge for, you might be surprised to find people signing up. For example you could have "featured tweets" with a retweet button underneath on the right side instead of (or in addition to) the ad block and charge for placement there for people who want their content to be more popular.
Do you think it's your user?
Also what are your thoughts on twitters changes to their rules of the road? I'm launching my own 3rd party service and have been warned by some mates. What advice can you give?
My answer is 4chan FYI. Although IMO janitors count as staff...
The hardest part was to scale it economically. I have always been a big fan of SSD's, which are instrumental in scaling a site that doesn't have the resources to put data they need fast access to in RAM. For example, a site with more money might use redis to cache all the pics for each user (sorted, unique lists), plus all the tweets that point to a pic, but there is too much for me to do that in RAM without selling organs. Also, redis is not very memory efficient. But the advantage is that technologies like that are easy to use and easy to scale. If you have money.
The Twitter rule changes freak me out every day but I have not seen any specific moves that make me think they are after me. It is probably a matter of time, but then you need to think about what form that will take. Will they just cut off the Streaming API? That would be a big move. Will they remove pics from the streaming API? I doubt it. Will they make moves to single me out? That would be weird. Will they come after me with lawyers for caching tweets? I don't see that either. But, while I don't see anything specific, there are a lot of what ifs.
My advice is to use Twitter to get off the ground and then move away from Twitter altogether if at all humanly possible. That's the strategy they are forcing with their stupid rules, so maybe they will see the light at some point and rethink their strategy.
Some suggestions:
1) Improving the quality of the site
2) Remove the adult content to attract better ad providers.
3) Look at adding a paid service (for power users) to hedge ad revenue. Be careful not to alienate current users.
4) Focus on a few key things and do them very well.
does the "possibly_sensitive" attribute in the Twitter API help at all? I ask because I'm looking into using it on a project, but I don't have enough source data to be able to tell how accurate it is.