TweetFace allows longer Tweets; What are its prospects?

While micro-blogging site Twitter has caught the imagination of almost everyone (even the Indian PM has an official Twitter handle), its 140-word limit can become a pain at times. TweetFace (derived by joining Tweet of Twitter and Face of Facebook) is trying to solve this problem by removing the restriction on the number of words its users can post on Twitter. Additionally, it also allows its users to make Facebook posts in rich text.

With TweetFace, users can do long Tweets with rich text, images as well as videos (the same applies for Facebook). They can also add word documents, excel files and PDFs to their tweets/Facebook posts.

For using the application, users have to login to TweetFace via their Twitter/Facebook accounts. Once logged-in, it provides its users with a Microsoft Word style editor that allows them to write in rich text and also add images/files/videos to their posts. Once completed, users can choose to post them individually or on both Twitter and Facebook at the same time.

The Facebook post/tweet is posted just like any ordinary post, but a link is added to it that redirects the reader to TweetFace. And since the service saves all the data on a server, the reader is able to read the post with its original formatting (with images/videos/rich text).

TweetFace also keeps count of the number of times a particular post viewed/liked/re-tweeted and it allows its users to reply or retweet to a post right from the app. They can also view all their previous tweets, as well as tweets from the people they are following. Additionally, it also displays all images uploaded and videos shared in a slide-show fashion so that people can quickly flick through them.

The website was developed by the duo of Sukhminder Singh (earlier a software consultant at CommerceXchange, UK) and Gurender Bedi (earlier a consultant at 2nd Byte), and while it was in the development phase since July 2011, it went live only in January this year. Also, in its nine months of operations, the site has managed to get some celebrities as its users including Amitabh Bachchan, Ali Zafar and Pia Bajpai.

While the site is mobile compatible, Android and iOS apps are also on the cards.

Hurdles in the path

While it is an interesting offering, it does have its shortcomings. First of all, every time you want to see who has re-tweeted/liked your post, you are redirected to the mother site (Twitter or Facebook), which makes it a tedious affair. Secondly, the user interface of the site is nothing to write home about. Then there are a number of other players who are already offering similar services for Twitter, like JumboTweet, XLTweet, Twenth and LongTweets, etc.

Finally, while the site makes sense for Twitter, we don't see much use for it for Facebook.

Also, with Twitter announcing new restrictions according to which independent software developers who have created Twitter apps can only have a maximum of 100,000 users, we don't see a very bright future for the site. While it is still early days for the site (with under 5,000 regular users), what happens when the user base starts growing (after all that is what every site wants) and reaches the limit set by the micro-blogging site.

Sukhminder had this to say, "We are in the process of offering our API to others so that they can make use of our services. When we will receive a request (from a registered client), we will create a post and send back a 'short message and a link to the post', which they can tweet."

So basically the site won't post to Twitter (circumventing the limit set by Twitter) and instead simply provide their offerings as a service to others. The company is also working on a YouTube and LinkedIn API, so that whatever is posted on TweetFace can also be posted to the websites.

(Edited by Prem Udayabhanu)

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