Over the last few months, my team and I have worked hard to make SportyTweets a trusting and dependable service for all Twitter users. It is our stance that we make Twitter better. Not only do we make Twitter better, but we also make our content partners very happy by providing them new visitors directly to their website. Our followers seem to appreciate the service as well.

SportyTweets has made every effort to simply provide quality news, and has never attempted to game the Twitter platform. All of our content is published with permission of our content partners. In fact, we constantly have to turn away new content partners wanting to be part of our network.

Know that we are reaching out to Twitter through all proper channels, and trust that our accounts should be back up in operation in due time. We look forward to getting back to work and building out the service. We prefer to do this all with Twitter’s blessings, and hopefully they agee.

Encourage Twitter to restore these accounts by sending a tweet.

Stay tuned to this blog for further updates.

What stood out to me is that Howard touts that StockTwits now has 80,000 subscribers. That number seems small to me for a company which has raised $1.5M in venture capital, has been covered extremely well in the online tech community, and is well connected to the online financial world. I realize we are living in the post Ashton Kutcher race to 1M followers (now well above 2M), and that 80,000 may seem a lot smaller in those terms. But, it’s very small, isn’t it?

In contrast, SportyTweets has 375,000+ subscribers, is engaging its community of followers, working directly with content partners, has raised no venture capital, all while laying below the radar of the tech community.

Although taken differing approaches, both StockTwits and SportyTweets are trying to accomplish the same goal – separating niche verticals from the mass Twitter audience, aggregating the conversation, and providing services those users want. I believe SportyTweets can take a few lessons from Stocktwits on some its feature sets, as we have still a lot of development remaining to complete. However, it’s striking that all those dollars have garnered only 20% of the audience of SportyTweets in relatively the same amount of time.

And to be clear, this blog post is not meant to bash or tease Stocktwits in any way. I guess, I’m just shocked that SportyTweets has performed so well when comparing it to a well oiled engine, such as Stocktwits.

I firmly believe that both services are in their infant years. As the Twitter community continues to grow, I look forward to the continued growth and maturation of both services, and welcome success to each.

Improvements and projects developed over the last month:

• improvements to our website
• follower counts listed on site
• new avatars for MLB team Twitter accounts
• a custom URL shortener, Spty.tw
• our own RSS-to-Twitter service
• identified advertising solutions
• gathered feedback from our followers

Work scheduled for this month

• implement RSS-to-Twitter engine
• implement Spty.Tw into all accounts
• add more college accounts
• update avatars for all remaining accounts
• audit each account for quality of news (sources, types of stories)
• add video alerts to each account
• giveaway promotions

There are many more improvements on the board not listed above. And we will try to share them with you as we get closer to tackling them. So, stay tuned here for updates.

As always, your feedback and comments are welcomed.

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