I have tons of business ideas. This was one I had that I knew I'd need help on, and I didn't get an excited response about. If you'd like to use it, feel free.
Organizations that want to participate on Twitter do not always have one person who should craft and send out all tweets.
-multiple people/departments might want to send messages out, possibly through one account
-there may be a need for approval from managers or PR or legal
-companies need a way of tracking who authored and who approved each message
No Twitter clients provide a workflow approval of this sort. Hootsuite allows users to post to other Twitter accounts if you authorize, but there's no approval process. It's not much different from giving your password out to a bunch of people.
Cotweet also allows multiple users to use one Twitter account.
The solution:
A site where users will see a Twitter accounts tweets (from friends or searches). Users can respond on the site or post original content to be sent out via Twitter, optionally scheduling when it should post. Every post would go through an approval workflow tailored for that user. Every tweet would get signoff from all necessary people and there would be a paper trail.
If there are messages that need approval by you (you're a manager, attorney, etc) you'll be notified by email.
If your message needs editing (as decided by manager, attorney, etc) you'll be notified.
There would be many possible views of streams based on searches, autotagging, hashes, users, etc.
This would be a backend and a web front end. Making other front ends (iphone, Flash, Air, etc.) would not require redoing all the functionality.
Next steps:
Add approval for posts to other sites.
Add preview/approval for pages hosted on 3rd party sites (Facebook pages, Twitter user pages, etc).
Who pays for this:
This could be sold in a number of ways:
1. One site that various companies pay a license for.
2. One site with a subdomain for each company (http://companyname.thesite.com)
3. We custom install and configure this for individual companies and support them. They run their own Twitter approval system, in other words.
4. License this to ad agencies and PR firms for them to use with their clients in one of the methods above, meaning either they'd:
-have all their clients go through their site (http://www.wk.com/twittermanager)
-they have subdomains for each of their clients (http://nike.wk.com)
-they sell custom installations and we handle the integration and management under their name
