UPDATED 11:08 EDT / MARCH 23 2010

CheapTweet: The Act of Dealhunting isn’t Sexy, But it is Effective

image Hayes Davis (and Jenn) are working this year on a project called CheapTweet (and a site called TweetReach).  The big news from Austin was the launch of CheapTweet 2.0.

The site just went through a major rebranding effort prior to SxSW, and crossed a milestone threshold, having indexed its five millionth deal.

The new feature that’s most exciting to them, they say, is something they’re calling the “dealstream.”

They find over 30,000 deals on Twitter a day, after de-duping retweets and such.  The feedback they were getting from their users was “better tools to keep track.” The dealstream allow you to filter it down and set up alerts for things relevant for you.

Once you log in, your given a set of categories and keywords to choose from and fill out.  Very simply after your account is set up, you can either refer back to the site, or create RSS feeds based on your various searches, and subscribe to them through the myriad of ways you can utilize that building block.

The site is at a solid foundation, and is used by a number of folks (almost famously, it seems, by deal-hunters like Chris Pirillo, for instance). The thing that impressed me the most about it was that aside from just working for it’s intended purpose, there’s a number of directions the site can go and continue to be useful outside that space, including as a platform for other utilities and sites for aggregating relevant deals and sales to accompany content production or a search engine.

Alternatively, as more and more location metadata is included into real-time updates on Twitter and elsewhere, personalized (instead of strictly sponsored) location-based updates are a real possibility on his platform.

CheapTweet Stands Out from the Crowd

image In the course of our conversation on CheapTweet, I asked Hayes a bit about his competition. The sense I had was that this wasn’t going to be “this wasn’t going to be this year’s Twitter,” and I know as well as you reading this that sites centered around coupons and deals issue a knee-jerk reaction of “meh” with the cool kids and the early-adopters.

Hayes readily admitted that in general, this sector “isn’t a sexy problem to solve.”

Coupons and deals space is typically driven by the “SEO up a site full of affiliate links,” said Hayes. “Our approach is driven by the technology and the utility, which sets us apart.  There are a few out there that are taking our approach, but on the whole coupons and deals isn’t a terribly sexy space, so it doesn’t always attract the type of people who want to push technology to reorder the noise into something useful.”

…And he goes out into the wilds to compare his approach to the competition, and comes back with the type of coupon site you’ve come to expect.

“I spend some time doing some searches and seeing what’s out there to get a handle on things,” Hayes said. “I came across diaper coupons, and click on the sixth result in Google. What do they want me to do to get the coupons? Download a toolbar! This is the world that’s been built up around this.  We want to change that, and raise the bar for this sector.”


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