Interview with Dean Robinson of Hahlo

Hahlo is designed to allow Twitter users to access and send messages via the iPhone. It uses the Twitter and Summize.com (recently purchased by Twitter) APIs. The main goal of Hahlo is to provide the most feature-rich Twitter client for the iPhone. Essentially that was the goal from the beginning… to try to provide as much of the functionality of the full web site but for the mobile environment.

I wouldn’t say I was a heavy user. I’ve probably become a heavier user since. I’d been using Twitter for about six months prior to it. I built the original prototype the night after last year’s keynote, when Steve Jobs announced that you could make web apps for the iPhone and my first thought was, “Oh, what can I make?” I thought Twitter was perfectly suited for use on the iPhone so, I started playing around and Hahlo was the result.

I’d say about probably 90 percent are using it on their iPhones or their iPod Touch. Of the remaining 10 percent the majority are using it in Safari. It works the best in Safari or Webkit. It also works great in Firefox. I use it myself in Firefox quite a lot. It helps because I have two accounts; and I use both Firefox and Safari simultaneously.

A popular thing that a lot of people are doing now is making use of an application called Fluid.app and running it. It’s a single-site browser and you end up running Hahlo like an application on your desktop.

Probably not in its current form. Maybe if I were to develop it further and were to build things that none of the services that I’m piggybacking on had. But, in its current form, probably not. It’s probably going to remain where I’m relying on the APIs provided by Twitter and Summize and I’m also using the Google Maps API as well now.

I’m always looking at ways that I can add features. Everyone’s always looking for a way to make a bit of money but it started out as a fun project. It’s still something I just do on the side. It’s not a full-time thing by any means. There’s definitely an opportunity in the future especially with the native apps and the Apple iPhone SDK that’s come out now.

It’s not something I’ve ruled out. For the moment it won’t be, partly because I don’t have the coding background or knowledge to write the application itself. I’ve got some friends and I work with a couple of guys who would be able to assist me with that, but that’s something that’s a little bit further down the road yet. That was part of the reason I did the big 3.0 upgrade with all the new features was to try and combat and keep a lot of my users when the native apps came out.

I don’t know. In some respects it probably is, they do have a lot of users. The question is how many of those users are using it heavily enough or consistently enough for you to be able to make money off their usage? I don’t know, I’m not sure on their numbers of users. I’ve heard things like three million total accounts.

I think, since I’ve launched Hahlo, the new version, at the start of May I think, it was, I’ve had twenty thousand different Twitter users log in, which I was quite surprised at. I had about 10 thousand in the first week which was quite impressive. But, even that only represents a very small percentage of Twitter’s overall usage base.

I get the impression a lot of people find it like that. They see that someone’s posted a tweet from Hahlo and they wonder what that is and click on it and that’s how they discover it. Also, there’s no extra sign-ups needed which makes it really easy for people to just jump in and try it out. Whether they stay or not doesn’t really matter because it hasn’t used up any of their time. They haven’t had to sign-up or fill out forms or anything.

Overall, I think, the last time I looked at my stats it’s probably around 75% is returning visitors. You have the occasional thing where a link will get posted on a web site and you get a whole bunch of hits from them and they all just view it once and that’s it. But, in general, a lot of the people who use it use it a lot, which is really nice to know. The number of hits over the last month has been fairly steady. It’s been around 10 thousand visits a day. Even though the number of new visits is going down, the number of actual visits is staying the same so the people who are coming and staying are using it more. Users are slowly dropping off as a percentage but overall the business numbers are staying the same.

The thing they need to focus on, and I’m pretty sure they are at the moment, is getting the structure and code in place in the back end to handle the extra users that a more mainstream system would bring. I’m sure you’ve noticed in the last couple of months they’ve had the occasional issue.

But, overall they’ve been pretty good to fix it up and tell people about it in various forms in their notation. I know that they’ve said they’re working on things so I’m guessing that that’s probably the sort of thing they’re looking at as well as improvements in scalability so that they can have 10,000,000 users, they can have 20,000,000, and it won’t affect it. But, I would say that until they’ve got the bigger capacity that it probably won’t grow much more than it is now. It grew really rapidly in a really short space of time, but I don’t know whether it’s still growing at that rate or not. I haven’t seen stats or anything on that.

Yeah, I’ve had the experience of having to explain it to my parents, as to what it’s like, and the same as Twitter explains it it’s a group SMS. But, then if you’ve got parents like mine who don’t really use SMS, then it’s hard to sell it to them. I know my parents check it to see when I’m updating and what I’m posting, but they don’t have an account themselves. They just check my timeline.

There are a lot of people who’ve used it who either don’t have the time or they don’t think they have enough content to write a traditional blog. So, they use something like Twitter and they can just post random thoughts here and there, and they don’t have to sit down and write a five hundred word essay on anything. They can just spit out 140 characters and they’ve got their post for the day if that’s all they want to do.

We’ve come up with about three or four different things that it could be and it could be some sort of identity crisis. Nobody knows whether it’s an SMS service, a blogging service, an update service, just a general social network. Maybe it does need to be communicated better what it is. Maybe that is the thing that scares people off – they don’t know what it is.

I’m sure they will but whether they can do it while they’re still building on top of other services, I don’t know how achievable that is. You can always go down the path that some clients have done where they insert ads in the hope that people click on them or that they’re paid for. But, that’s something I in particular steer clear of because viewing space on the platform is limited to begin with and I didn’t want to fill it with ads. I probably could be making some money there but my experience in the past with ads is that no everyone clicks on them anyway. I guess, it depends on the service.

I don’t know with Twitter because there’s such a wide range of clients. Twitter’s probably a really good example in that there are probably hundreds of different clients out there that people would use. I’ve got a fairly large user base, but I would imagine that something like Twitterific has an even larger one. And in the case of theirs you can buy a license which removes the ads, and I would imagine they made a lot of money out of that because people didn’t like the ads. And again with their iPhone out, if they decide to sell that for a price they’re going to make a lot of money as well.

But they’re all sort of one-off costs. Once you’ve bought it you’ve bought it, unless they charge an upgrade fee in the future. They can get all that money to start with, but whether they can continue to get the money further on… I’ve had a few donations through PayPal. It doesn’t cover the amount of work I’ve put into it but it’s nice to get.