The new year is well and truly underway. I've been back in London now for a few weeks, plugging away. 

A few exciting things are on the horizon. There has been a renewed interest recently in monitter.com (the real time twitter tracking website I created back in Aug 2008). I blogged about the idea and the development process and monitter gained a fair bit of exposure at that time - marketed almost entirely using twitter. Since then, it has continued to maintain a pretty solid following, now sitting with an average of around 40,000 unique visitors a month - although this figure spikes significantly when there are natural disasters, elections or other important events going on.

So, since a lot of businesses were also using monitter.com to monitor brand awareness, find leads and deal with customers - we introduced a very simple, unobtrusive advertising model.  Basically, at infrequent intervals, monitter would inject an advertisement into the feed that the user was watching. This gained some success (gauged mostly from the fact that the first ad was an ad for users to donate to monitter, which paid for our hosting overheads for a few months). 

We have also implemented some monitter based solutions for companies that were looking for a more effective solution to twitter tracking, this also generated a small amount of revenue.

We have also implemented some monitter based solutions for companies that were looking for a more effective solution to twitter tracking, this also generated a small amount of revenue.

Now, in the past few weeks, monitter has again been generating a lot of interest. Firstly from a VC firm who are expanding into social media, then from a few different advertising networks who wanted to include monitter in their publishing platforms. This has prompted us to re-evaluate our stance on taking monitter forward. The result of this re-evaluation is that we have decided to dedicate some time to making monitter into a more profitable business.

As it stands, monitter costs more than it earns to maintain. A sorry state of affairs. However, also one that stands to change in the near future. Twitter have released a more reliable and efficient technology for tracking tweets and this has prompted us to re-build monitter from the ground up, as an engine for businesses to monitor brand response and search for leads. The basic principle remains the same, however the new system will allow users to also track tweets that happen while they are not actually watching the stream - meaning you'll never miss any relevant information. This was always a goal we had with monitter, however it was not feasible using the existing technology - times have changed though.

So, the near future will see the new version of the monitter site coming live. While we will not be removing the free service, we will be launching the new system as a subscription based service, aimed directly at the businesses that currently use the system. This will be an extreme value add and we think many people will benefit from the new offering.

If anyone is a user of twitter, or monitter already and has any ideas as to features they'd like to see included, drop us an email, or post a comment.. we'd love to hear what you want and need. Otherwise, check back here regularly, as I'm hoping to keep blogging and maintain a fairly transparent development cycle with regards to the expansion of monitter - it just feels right, it's always been a community project, and we'd like to keep the community involved.