MyTweetMag Blog

About

Hi. My name is Sebastian Schuermanns and I am the founder of MyTweetMag. I actually live in Berlin, but I founded MyTweetMag in early summer 2010 in the beautiful city of Hamburg. I am a solo-founder and run this platform as a part-time-job. But nevertheless MyTweetMag has grown up to a professional-like webservice. This is possible because I get support from some fantastic freelancers: Achim Schaffrinna from Germany, who did the design and Slava from Belorus, who does all the programming. Frank Bueltge from Germany coded the wordpress plugin. You can find me on twitter, google+, facebook, xing or Linkedin.

What I think about Curation and MyTweetMag

You probably know the famous quote of Clay Shirky: “It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure“. But where are the filters, that really work? Many solutions have been discussed, beginning with pure algorithms and ending with the “curation”-trend, that focuses on human filtering. A lot of well known people take part in this discussion, like Steve Rosenbaum (curation nation), Eli Pariser (filter bubble), Robert Scoble, Matthew Ingram, Robin Good, Joshua Benton (NiemanLab) and many others. And – of course – a lot of curation-tools have been developed, which follow different approaches:

• social aggregation tools like tweetedtimes, paper.li or the beautiful flipboard. These tools use the recommendations of your social networks to aggregate information-overviews using special algorithms. It’s a more technical approach.
• manual curation tools like storify, scoop.it or pearltrees. These tools are plattforms, where people can curate information manually without any algorithms or automations. It’s a more editorial approach.

Well, MyTweetMag is another manual curation tool based on twitter. The plattform enables one or more twitter-users to create a topic-related “magazine” by simply using their twitter-links. MyTweetMag sucks out these links and displays them as headline, abstract or embedded media-file in a blog-like stream.

But looking at the motivation for users to curate a topic, MyTweetMag want’s to be more than just another curation-plattform:

Show Your Passion

Yes, MySpace is going down, but it’s still interesting what Mike Jones has dropped when he talked about curation: “we’re recognizing users who are particularly passionate about specific topics…“. I read this some days ago and I find myself confirmed in my thinking: Curation is not mainly driven by people, who want to inform other people and help them with the filter-failure. Curation is driven by people, who are passionate about a topic and who want to show their passion to the world!

Think about movies: I like watching movies, but I don’t have the time to stay updated. When I moved to Hamburg, I got closer to an old friend who is really a passionate cineaste. He loved to talk about films, movies and actors, and I loved to follow his recommendations. Just look around yourself: do the people only want to inform you or do they want to show their passion, demonstrate their knowledge and boost their reputation?

MyTweetMag wants to be more than just another curation tool: It wants to be

• easy and fast like twitter
• individual like tumblr and
• stylish and emotional like about.me.

In one simple formula: MyTweetMag want’s to be the personal and dynamic webcard for your passion.

How MyTweetMag grew up

Finally some fun for you: As solo-founder with a bootstrapped lean-startup (oh my dear!) I look back to a quite funny and – let’s say – trashy evolution of MyTweetMag:

At the beginning (2007/2008) I developed several news-channel-concepts and tried to find some investors. Of course I had no luck. In early 2009, after the glorious boom of twitter, I decided to create a small twitterbased solution, that was inspired (but no copycat) by the moscow-startup “twittertim.es” and the israelian webservice “readtwit”. The first concept looked like this:

After hiring a developer, a first version of MyTweetMag has been launched in late spring 2010 with my own homegrown layout:





I don’t remember why but I decided to hire a designer after that. The first relaunch of MyTweetMag took place in late summer 2010:





With the redesign we got reviewed by several magazines and bloggers in germany, uk, usa, india and elsewhere. But for me it was more important to concentrate on the concept and to find out, what users really want. During a period of 12 month we published about 6 new releases with many new features. And things got better and better…

Now we have done the final relaunch: with new features, a new “philosophy” and a completly new design. What you can learn from it? Start small, love what you do and (hopefully) become big :-)

Aktualisiert am July 14, 2011