Creator of TwitterCounter and TheNextWeb Brings Us a Google+ Metrics Site [INTERVIEW]

As the number one Twitter metrics site, TwitterCounter.com is a great way to analyze and find Twitter statistics. The man behind that service is Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, also the founder of TheNextWeb and the annual TheNextWeb Conference. With all the buzz surrounding Google+ right now, Boris has jumped into action once again, putting his midas touch on a Google+ metrics service called SocialStatistics. We got in touch with the man himself to find out more about it. Here is our interview with him.

1. You have founded TwitterCounter, TheNextWeb, and now SocialStatistics.com. What made you get into making a metrics web service?

By accident really. A few years ago I wanted to display a button on TheNextWeb.com showing my follower count on Twitter. Such a service didn’t exist yet and I figured I’d give it a weekend to find out if I could build it myself with my limited knowledge of PHP. It went faster than I expected and exactly one week after I started we launched TwitterCounter.com.

Since then it has grown into a successful company that does business with almost every company in the fortune 500 offering detailed Twitter statistics. SocialStatistics.com is a similar story. I first logged into Google+ the day they launched, played around a bit and on Friday showed it to the lead developer of TwitterCounter.com and pointed out the follower numbers on the public profiles. “We should be able to track that too, right?” I said but he shrugged it off and explained me they were too busy with TwitterCounter.com at the moment.

So on Sunday I started coding myself and on Monday evening we launched SocialStatistics.com. On Tuesday we sold the first featured spots for USD 99 and now we have raised prices to USD 199 a week and we are still sold out for the next 2 weeks.

2. How many profile have you tracked so far with SocialStatistics?

We now track more than 40,000 profiles. At TwitterCounter.com we actively spidered new accounts but at SocialStatistics.com this growth is manual. That means that every profile we track has been added manually at first. The advantage is we don’t have to keep track of accounts that are inactive for users that will never visit us. The downside is that we might not have history for you when you apply today. It does allow us to manage our growth a bit better.

3. How about Indonesia? Can you provide us some statistics about Indonesian Google+ users?

We do track ‘Location’ from people’s profile but that is a free text input field so not many people just enter ‘Indonesia’. That makes it hard to track country information.

4. Some people have called Google+ a potential Facebook-killer or Twitter-killer. What’s your opinion?

I don’t see any service killing off any other service. Television didn’t kill radio and Internet didn’t kill television. Facebook didn’t kill Myspace, Myspace just stopped innovating and got left behind. If you paint a line with Facebook at the far left and Twitter at the far right I think Google+ fits right in the middle. It is more complex than Twitter but not as frivolous as Facebook. There is more conversation and text there than at Facebook.

5. I have seen TheNextWeb improve a lot over the last six months. What’s your plan for TNW for this year? How big is TNW right now?

TheNextWeb.com is a top 10 blog in reach and influence according to Technorati. We plan to make it to the top five within a year.

To reach Boris, you can follow him on Twitter or add him to your circle.