How much do you know about who is following you? The emails from Twitter have improved with time to tell us who is following, their avatar, followers and following count. Useful, but still not a lot to go on.
Enter Twhois, a free service that works to identify the wider social profile of a Twitter user. A riff on Whois, devised and built by Andrea Olivato, a web developer from Tuscany. He took time to explain the concept and answer some questions exclusively for The Next Web.
Twhois is the twitter whois tool, a web instrument able to gather a lot of useful information about a twitter user. Exactly like you go on whois.com to know more about a website and the person behind it, you use twhois to get a deep knowledge about your followers/following. This knowledge includes their other social media profiles, a live stream for all of them and professional information like company, email, role and location grabbed directly from linkedin-like social websites.
Twhois has now been rolled out to mobile, currently available on Android only, “No one here uses mac or got an iphone, this is why differently from the masses, we still don’t own an iphone app. ” Andrea has hinted that they may have started looking at an iPhone app but won’t be drawn on when we could see it.
Internationally , Twhois has seen great success in China, “We found a great partner in China, mostly helping our android app to spread in their country/market. They already internationalized the app which is currently available in the Market, and promoted with direct download in the mobile section of 91.com. Moreover they offered us a collaboration for offering our app to their partners (major mobile handset manufacturers and leading laptop makers) both for installing directly on devices and offering them on private markets/expansion SD cards.”
The current version is in the English Language and international translation is high on Andrea’s agenda with any offers of support translation welcomed!.
Further developments of Twhois are planned when time allow, “We’re going to offer a free API service for developers at the end of February. Still, this is based on cached-data only, so new searches are enabled only through the main website. We would be delighted to find someone developing extensions for browsers. That should be both easy and useful for people.” Plans are also under way to integrate the system with Google’s Social Graph API which would be cool.
We have found Twhois to be a useful tool which quickly adds depth to most Twitter profiles, why don’t you give it a try?
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