When in doubt, change your focus. So says the makers of Kutano with their browser add on. The CEO was quoted by VentureBeat as saying: “The original product was about having discussions on the web, but the focus now is about connecting you with other Twitter users.” Quite a shift, but it is always good to see people changing their focus to build a more useful product. I have been following Kutano since its launch, and have just put its new version through the paces. Let’s see what we have here.
In a nutshell, Kuatno displays tweets that are relevant to the webpage that you are viewing in a sidebar. The company has an overview here. The tweets that it offers up are (in my testing) near to 15 minutes behind real time. This is probably due to Twitter’s API being overloaded, but is still an annoyance when you are viewing new posts on a blog, and all the listed tweets have yet to cover them. That aside, Kutano does do an excellent job about pulling in tweets that do in fact match up with the webpage you are on.
It is a mildly similar to doing a search.twitter.com search for every page that you load, which is surprisingly useful. Of course, the more obscure the website, the less useful Kutano is. I pulled up my blog (AlexWilhelm.com) and it did find a relevant tweet. Sadly, it only found one, for all time. Not that my personal blog moves any mountains, but it has gotten a fair number of tweets over the months, its almost a year old now. Where are they? Of course, this is still a very early Kutano release, and most people will use it on larger pages, but I was still hoping for more depth.
Even though Kutano is useful, I am not sure that in its current form it is enough in its current form to gain mass adoption. I might be wrong, a Twitter search brings up a fair amount of chatter about the product, and it was recently covered by a number of major publications. Whatever its user future looks like, the service is looking towards hyper-targeted advertising to monetize the product. This is feasible, but will require a crack development team to get sorted out correctly.
It does not seem like they will be monetizing anytime soon.
The new Kutano is better than the old Kutano, I doubt that anyone disagrees. The focus on the free information that Twitter has, instead of building a new informational database, was a solid move by the team. Of course, I am still pulling for Chrome integration, but that can wait. If Kutano can indeed add to its Twitter capabilities and does manage to build an install base that numbers in the tens of thousands, it might find the momentum to make it. If you have any numbers on how Kutano is doing, we want to hear them. More as it comes.
