Back in the early days of Twitter in the UAE, I used to follow all UAE users and it allowed me to stay on top of what they're talking about. But after they grew into the thousands, it became impossible for me to manage that, so I wanted to create a tool that would act as a "smart filter" for all UAE tweets and see what the UAE Twitter users are talking about, current regional trends, what they are the linking to, and be able to search for stuff only through UAE tweets.

Venture Maven did the same concept for venture capitalists and the website was an inspiration to create UAETweets.

We started creating some parts of it (trends, search) separately a while ago as parts of internal experimentation that we usually do in CloudAppers and then we decided to create the full-blown website, and it took us about 2 weeks to get it done, but not full-time.

The response have been great and people seem to be liking the service, I didn't do any publicity for it, since it's something that I built for me and anyone who might be interested in what it offers.

Without doubt, Twitter is niche in the region and contrary to what others might think, it's a great thing. I don't want to sound elitist, but Twitter is currently being used by people whose opinions matter to me, so it has a higher signal-to-noise ratio.

I don't think Twitter will be as mainstream as Facebook is, but again, that's a good thing. Check out the report that I tweeted a while ago about why teens don't tweet.

We're just getting started with UAETweets and we have lots of stuff we need to do, some of which:

1. Improve trends and make them more real-time.
2. Create a script to automatically add all new UAE twitter users to UAETweets.
3. Come up with an accurate way to measure the number of UAE Twitter users.
4. Improve search and add advanced search.
5. Add daily stats on UAE twitter users, most popular, most active, most retweeted, etc. Sort of leaderboard.
6. Release "State of the UAE Twittersphere" every few months, that contains findings, trends and themes of twitter usage in UAE based on detailed stats and our analysis on them.

And many more ideas. We're going to poll the Twitter community regularly on the features they want us to work on.

We don't have a monetization plan for the site. It was created mostly for research purposes so this is what we're going to focus on. We won't say no to money, but we're not going to run after it either, at least not at this stage.

We're open to all kinds of possibilities to integrate with any website or API if it will produce interesting results or new uses, but we're going to approach that as we go along and work on whatever is interesting the most or what people need the most.