Hootsuite's corporate Twitter client comes to iPhone

So who are you?

So I am the developer of the HootSuite iPhone app. My name is Richard.

Yeah, and what is hootsuite?

Hootsuite is the social media dashboard for. It's also a professional Twitter client.

Yeah, a lot of corporate clients use it.

Yeah, lots of corporate clients.

So how does it compare to all the other ones?

It's way better than all the other ones.

Well, why? Because there's like Tweedy and Seismic and Tweetdeck, you know. So give me your picture.

Look. Okay, let me just show you some of the features. Okay. Alright. So I think. So one of the big features is multiple account management. So if you have Tweedy and all that stuff, Tweetie and all the other iPhone apps out there, you have to always switch between different accounts and so on. But hootsuite for iPhone is made for multiple accounts. So as you can see here, I have all my streams. So I have like 20 different streams going on here. And if I go into my streams, I can. So here's my personal feedback, here's all my tweets. So on. If I want to switch over to a different feed, I can swipe over.

Yeah.

And it'll keep loading them all. It's fully customizable. So if I wanted to have say seven different accounts, I can have one account then.

So I have three accounts, one for my blog, one for my videos, and.

My main Twitter account. So you can customize however you want if you want all your home feeds together, all your mentions together, DMs together and so on.

Now does it work only with Twitter or does it support Facebook?

Facebook is coming out in the next release.

Okay.

Yeah. Then another interesting features are I have seven accounts here. I can tweet from all accounts all at once, just like on the web app. I can also schedule a tweet. So say I want to send it tomorrow off tomorrow. Right. And all I do is just click on this, send it, send it later. If you type in a URL, you can use the built in Ally shortener, which will give you click stats for all of the accounts.

Yeah.

Then you can also view. Click stats here. So if I go to the HootSuite account, we can see that.

Now is this a free app? Is this a free app or how.

Do you guys monitor this?

How much does it cost?

It costs $1.99 right now.

Okay, two bucks.

Yeah, two bucks.

That's cheap.

Yeah. There's a free app coming out next Tuesday. Okay. And it's a limited version, so there's no sense.

Well, it's not next Tuesday because this video is going out on Tuesday, so.

It'S coming today anyway. So as you can see, here was a link that was tweeted out earlier today and it has 178 clicks.

And that's what's really cool, is seeing the charting.

Yeah, yeah. And so you can have real time stats on the go of how effective you are at tweeting.

Can you compare charts like in past charts, like week by week or month by month?

Not on the iPhone app. On the web app, there's a lot.

More stronger metrics because that's useful to know. Oh, most of my traffic comes on Tuesday morning. Well, that's when you should spend the time doing your best tweeting.

Then some other interesting things are you have your Twitter trends here and also has trending explanations of why something's trending. If you go into one of them, say I have something I'm searching on right now. So Canadians.

Yeah, Right.

So here's all the tweets for Canadians right now.

Canadian hockey.

Yeah, Canadian hockey. So Canada is trending. It's all about the Canadian women's gold. So I can save it, right? I can save it to one of my tabs. So I'm going to save it to my personal tab. And if I go to my streams here, it's right there at the bottom.

Very cool.

I can edit it and rearrange. However I. I can switch my whole tabs altogether. So if I want my personal tab to go at the bottom.

Oh, that's nice. Do you guys support lists?

Yep. We have Twitter list in here. So if I go. Let's see. So if I want to add, you.

Can see lists from all your accounts. I have some lists on one account, some lists on the other.

So if I go add column, I can go to list here. Right. I can select my account. So there they are. Select new friends. Great. And save it. And there it is.

Very cool. Do you support the new Retweet API?

Not yet. That's going to be coming out in the next release.

When's the next release coming out?

Probably in about two weeks.

Okay, very cool. And do you support the Geolocation API?

Not yet. That's also in the next release.

Next release. So the next release is a big one.

Yeah.

Okay.

It's going to have Facebook and a lot of other stuff.

Okay, cool. Well, it looks like a great app. I'm going to try it out. And this comes out as the video comes out. So Tuesday morning.

Well, this is the full version. So it's already out.

Oh, it is. Okay. So what's coming out in the lite version?

So for everyone who doesn't want to pay for the app, you can actually try the account. It's limited to three Twitter accounts. There's no stats reporting.

Oh, very cool, very cool. So what else are you guys thinking of doing? What else is happening in the marketplace in terms of mobile?

Mr. Ryan Holmes.

Who are you?

I'm Ryan Holmes.

Yeah.

What do you do?

Hootsuite.

Yeah. And so what are you seeing happen in the marketplace and how do you think hootsuite is competing? What is the competitive?

Well, on the mobile front, I mean, by the time this interview comes out, we are going to be releasing our Android app. So we've got almost identical Android app being released. We're really excited about it. Both will be free and paid versions. We are working on a BlackBerry app and our goal is just to have complete coverage. And our tool is a social media dashboard for social media managers. And so we want to give them all the tools that they need and we have a bit of a professional slant for power users and small medium enterprise users and so just giving them all the tools they need when they need them and we're where they need them. So I think between those three mobile platforms and our web based product, we've got really great coverage for everybody.

Very cool. What's it like being up here in Vancouver other than right now? It's like awesome.

Yeah, yeah, it's crazy.

Olympics is in town.

Crazy with the Olympics. A lot of parties, really good events. But Vancouver is a great place to be. We really love it and our team's here. I'm on the road quite a bit. I spent a lot of time in San Francisco and a lot of time in New York, but I always love coming back. It's a beautiful city and it's got mountains.

It seems like there's a good startup community building being built here.

Yeah, there's a good startup community. Yeah. I think there's great engineering talent. We keep, you know, we've got funding for hootsuite this winter, this Christmas.

And who funded you again?

It was Hearst Media and, and Bloomberg out of San Francisco. Who's Hearst Media out of New York. That's one of the kind of, you know, slights on the, on the Canadian or the Vancouver startup scene is that we need more angel, more VC capital investment up here.

That's why they brought a bunch of angels up here for the Olympics.

Yeah, it's coming I can see it's building and there's, you know, definitely a lot of interest and seems to be, you know, a lot of good groups getting some results up. So I think we'll see some good things coming up the next year.

Are you guys doing anything for south by Southwest?

Yeah, we'll be at south by Southwest. We're going to be. We're going to be doing a bunch of kind of guerrilla promotions and a few things we have planned. So, yeah, definitely be having some good times there.

Okay. And anything else we should know about hootsuite? What's happening in the marketplace or even what's happening with the marketplace? What do you think is going to happen over the next few months?

Well, I think it seems like a.

Really hyper competitive marketplace.

It's.

It is hyper competitive on the client side. A lot of the Twitter clients that are out there all kind of started and had a lot of good energy on it the last year. A lot of great developments happen and a lot of people just getting their core features together. And then I think we're seeing more and more people getting specialized into where they want to be. I see tweetdeck, they're very consumer focused. Sees mix. Very consumer focused.

You guys probably compete more with co Tweet.

Yeah, I mean, they're over on the full enterprise side. We kind of straddle a little bit in the middle. But I think the interesting thing is we're just seeing everybody kind of just get their good positioning for their product. So I think the marketplace is really maturing. We don't see as many new entrants coming in because the bar for somebody to get in as a Twitter client right now, it's not just a Twitter client anymore. It's a social media client. You have to have Facebook integration, you have to have Twitter integration. You have to have maybe WordPress, LinkedIn, you know, we incorporate all those. And we're also a year and a bit under development. So if anybody wants to kind of get in the market right now, it's going to take them like a year to get in. And in that time, we're going to be another year further down the road. So I think it's, you know, it's a really good time and we're seeing a lot of interesting stuff.

What do you guys think about Buzz? Google Buzz?

I think it's great. I mean, it's another channel. Right. And I think the thing that Twitter has done is just made everybody realize how important this microblogging and update kind of functionality is. And we've seen everybody starting with Facebook and LinkedIn and everybody down the line has incorporated microstatus updates, et cetera. And I think this is just another extension of that. I think Google's going to do really well with it in the long run. I mean, they're providing an infrastructure just like Twitter did that people. People can build into. And I think we're going to obviously incorporate it into our dashboard and we'll see a lot of other people doing that.

When do you think we're going to see some radically new features? I've been talking about molecular content or curation. People have been talking about, hey, how do I join three or four tweets with maybe a YouTube video, maybe a blog post, and then write something else about all four or five of those things and combine them together?

Well, I think I know you're like a real power user on a lot of this stuff, and I think the interesting thing with Twitter and why I think it had a lot of adoption is it's so simple, right? You get there. There's like one thing, you can do a form and hit submit, and that's kind of about it. And as things get more and more complex, you get kind of more and more fringe user stuff. And that's not to say it's a bad thing, but I think the cool thing about Twitter and how they open up their API is that people can do all that fringe stuff and they'll find a market for it. And people that want really deep analytics or people that want to do discovery or sentiment analysis, all of those people are out there and they're building kind of on these social platforms. So right now we've been building the building blocks, like the client. This last year probably was the year of clients, right? And this next year, maybe it's the year of analytics. And then sentiment analysis. There's going to be a lot of other things that come. Come on. Because people have solved the client need. They're going to be building these other things, kind of like stuff you're mentioning.

Very cool. Anything else we should know about hootsuite?

Just keep watching. We have a lot of really cool stuff coming up over the next few months. We've got a release that we're doing in conjunction with Twitter, which is pretty exciting, and I can't really talk a.

Lot more about it.

You'll definitely hear it.

So Twitter has a developer conference coming up in April, right? And what's that? Chirp.

Chirp.

Yeah. And you guys will be there?

We'll be there. Yeah, a good team down there, and we're looking forward to that. I think, you know, March and April are going to be pretty exciting months. We've just done a release. We've got two more coming up.

So where do you get the name hootsuite?

That's a very funny story. We actually started under a different name. We ran for about two months under this other name. And kind of unbeknownst to us at time, the time, there was not a competitive product, but another company out there in the space with a very similar name. And they approached us and said, hey, guys, kind of close. Do you mind? And we weren't really far into our branding and awareness, and so we actually crowdsourced our name. We had our owl mascot at that point, and we crowdsourced it out. We had, I don't think, 50,000 followers on our Twitter account and asked people what we should call ourselves, and somebody came up with Hoots. And it was just a perfect fit and for brand and for our trademark and our logo and all that. So we went ahead with that, and it's been really good for us ever since.

Very cool. Well, good luck, and I'll be trying it out.

Thank you very much.