So long, Twezr, it’s been fun. The mobile social contacts application Twezr is being shut down after having a fairly well-received launch back in November 2010. The app, for those unaware, was based on a great idea: it was a social address book. It aggregated all the activity from your phone’s contacts (e.g., phone calls, SMS’s, voicemails) alongside their social networking activity (e.g., Facebook and Twitter updates)
Now the company is removing its app from the iTunes App Store and working to build a new location-based photo sharing app called Spotpix instead.
Says the company, Spotpix “has a great potential to solve some real world problems.” That’s probably a bit much, considering that the app seems to just involve geo-tagging photos so you can remember the places you’ve been. Yep, never seen that before.
Sadly, Twezr was actually the more promising of the two concepts. By combining a contact’s phone-based activity alongside social updates, it could function as sort of a social CRM for everyday users.
So what went wrong? Well, for starters, at launch, the app didn’t use OAuth standards to gain access to your social services, and actually asked users for their Gmail, Facebook and Twitter passwords. That’s a big no-no. Also, from personal experience, the app struggled to load large address books. It crashed, too.
Maybe solving the real, “real world problem” of building the next great social address book (I’ve yet to find an app that really shines here, although Friends came close), was too much for a small team. Photo-sharing may be more Twezr’s speed.
Here’s the letter Twezer emailed its users:
Dear Twezr User,
Over the past few months we’ve been developing Spotpix, a very interesting location based photo sharing app. Spotpix has a great potential to solve some real world problems. As we’re a small startup with limited resources, we’ve decided to focus on Spotpix and withdraw Twezr from the app store and shut down Twezr service over the next few days. We regret the inconvenience. We hope you’ll find another personal organizer app that closely matches your needs to replace Twezr or switch back to the native apps.
We hope you’ll try out Spotpix when we launch. You can sign up for early access (http://spotpix.me) and also follow Spotpix on Twitter (http://twitter.com/#!/spotpixapp) to stay tuned.
Sincerely,
Team Twezr