CheapTweet Blog

We chose a winner for the pig-naming Bye Bye Birdie contest. Watch the video below to see what name won.

Milton is the new CheapTweet mascot! He’s going to help all of us save lots of money.

Help us name our new mascot! We’re running a contest to see who can come up with the best name for our new pig. Just tweet:

Hey @cheaptweet, name the pig _____! http://bit.ly/c0cjdZ #cheaptweetpig

and you’ll be entered to win some cool CheapTweet swag and be immortalized for your pig-naming skills.

You’re probably familiar with our beloved mascot – the adorable bird who tweets about good deals. We’ve had this bird for more than a year, but it’s time for us to move on. So as we usher in a new era of finding deals, we say goodbye to the bird and present to you the new CheapTweet mascot – this incredibly cute little pig.

But this pig needs a name! And we need your help in picking something really, really good. Starting right now, we’re going to solicit all the name recommendations we can via Twitter. We’ll then pick our favorite name and whoever comes up with that name will win a great prize!

To enter, post this message with your name idea: “Hey @cheaptweet, name the pig _______! http://bit.ly/c0cjdZ #cheaptweetpig”

• Tweet the message above with your suggestion filled in
• Don’t DM us
• Tweet as many name suggestions as you want

The contest will run through Thursday night.

• Contest ends at 10:00 p.m. CST, Thursday, 3/11/10
• We’ll announce the winner on Friday, 3/12/10

Whoever picks the best name gets a great prize!

• The CheapTweet team will select their favorite name from all the suggestions
• Whoever picks the best name will win a CheapTweet t-shirt, plus other fun surprises
• If we find more than one name we like, we might have a run-off

So, what do you think should we name our new pig?

It’s a very big day in the CheapTweet office. We just indexed our 5 millionth deal tweet! To celebrate monumental tweet #5,000,000, we’re rolling out some awesome new CheapTweet features, including something we’ve very, very excited about – the CheapTweet DealStream. We’ve also enhanced our search engine technology, implemented a new voting mechanism, polished up our site, and got a new logo and a new mascot! Here’s more information about the new CheapTweet.com.

DealStream

We’ve been quietly testing the CheapTweet DealStream for a little while – some of you have been part of our beta test – and now it’s time to share it with everyone. This is a very cool new feature, and we can’t wait for you to try it.

Did you know that we find more than 30,000 new deal tweets most days? That’s a whole lot of deals, and it can be hard to sort through all that to find what you want. This is why we created the DealStream – it’s a personalized and fully customizable stream of only the deals you want to see. There’s a lot more about how to set up your DealStream here. You need a CheapTweet account to use the DealStream, so either sign in or sign up to use it.

Upgraded Search Engine

We’ve made some very useful enhancements to our search engine, which uses specialized algorithms to aggregate tweets about the same deals. This helps you quickly see what deals are popular, reduces duplicate deals on the site, and really helps us sort through spam. Of those 30,000 new tweets we find each day, only about half of them actually make it to the site.

New Voting Mechanism

We’ve removed the It’s Cheap and It’s Lame buttons and replaced them with a straightforward thumbs up and thumbs down button. Just give a thumbs up to the deals you like and a thumbs down to the deals you don’t. Piece of cake.

New Logo and Site Design

One our favorite parts of the new CheapTweet.com is our new mascot. Isn’t this little pig so cute? We’ll be running a contest to help us pick a name for him soon; stay tuned for those details. We’ve got some great prizes for the winner. And in addition to the new mascot and logo, we’ve polished up the way the site looks.

Got any questions about the new features? Let us know! We’re on Twitter and Facebook.

We just launched a very cool new feature on CheapTweet.com – the CheapTweet DealStream. It’s a whole new way to find the deals you’re looking for, making it easier, faster and even more fun than ever before. If you don’t have a CheapTweet account, now’s the time to sign up!

Here’s some more information about how the DealStream works and how to set up your own personalized DealStream.

What is the CheapTweet DealStream?

The CheapTweet DealStream finds the exact deals you want, and delivers them to you right when you want them. The CheapTweet DealStream is a real-time feed of personalized recommendations just for you. You can set your preferences for what kinds of deals you want to see – you can follow certain brands or stores, as well as different kinds of products or keywords.

Every day, we filter through more than 20,000 deal tweets to add more than 10,000 new deals to the site. The DealStream filters through all of these deals – more than 5 million deals overall – to find the perfect deals just for you. It helps you find what you want quickly and easily.

How do I set up my DealStream?

Getting started with the DealStream is simple. You can tweak these settings later, so just pick some to get things started. You’ll need a CheapTweet account to use the DealStream, so go sign up here if you don’t have one already (or sign in to your existing account here).

When you first sign into your account after clicking on the DealStream link, you’ll be taken to the initial DealStream setup page. Setting up your DealStream takes less than a minute.

1. What general categories interest you? Check as many as you like. If you check on a top-level category, like Fashion & Beauty, we’ll automatically fill in the sub-categories. If you’re only interested in one or two sub-categories under a top-level category, just check those.
2. Enter in some keywords to refine your DealStream. You can get as specific as you want here. Type in words or phrases that describe the names of stores, brands, or products you like.
3. Once you’ve entered your preferences, click the “I’m done” button to see the deals we’ve found for you.

You can update these prefences at any time, so you’re not locked into what you set up initially. Play around with it, see what works for you.

How do I make my DealStream smarter?

You can further refine your DealStream in two ways: voting on deals and editing the categories and keywords you selected.

Click the thumbs up button on deals you like. Click thumbs down button on deals you don’t like. When you give a deal the thumbs down, you can also tell us why you don’t like it. Just click on the pink gear that appears when you click thumbs down, then tell us more about why you didn’t like that deal. All this helps us know what deals to show you next time.

At any time, you can edit the categories and keywords you are following. Just click Edit next to categories or keywords and make any changes you’d like.

How do I see my DealStream?

Once you’ve set up your DealStream, you can see the deals it has found for you in several ways. You can always log back into CheapTweet and click on the DealStream button on the top left of the page.

You can also get an RSS feed of your DealStream. Just click on the “DealStream Feed” button on the right side of your DealStream page. Then you can set up the DealStream RSS feed in your favorite feed reader.

It’s March, and that means South by Southwest is almost here!

South by Southwest (SXSW) is a music, film and technology conference and festival held every year in Austin. It’s ten days of interesting panels, fun parties, lots of networking and creativity all over the place. And best of all, CheapTweet will be there! We had a great time last year and are really looking forward to this year.

Both Hayes and I (Jenn) are speaking on panels during the Interactive portion of the conference. Hayes is speaking on a very cool panel titled “The Broke Diaries: Using Blogs And Twitter To Live Cheaply”. Hayes and his fellow panelists will be discussing ways to use social media tools to save money. That panel is at 2:00 on Friday, 3/12 in Hilton Room A/B. Jenn’s speaking on the panel called “Is Technology Weakening Interpersonal Relationships?” (Her answer? No way.) That panel is at 3:30 on Friday, 3/12 in Room 12AB. We’ll post notes about both when we’re done.

We’ll have a bunch of sweet CheapTweet swag to hand out – t-shirts, stickers, and more! If you’re attending SXSWi, let’s meet up. We’d love to talk to you in person.

Also, we’re launching a bunch of cool new features next week. Don’t worry – you don’t have to attend SXSW to use the features. We’ll be talking a lot more about this soon. So stay tuned for the big news.

See you in Austin next week!

CheapTweet is headquartered in Austin, Texas, and it never snows here. Seriously, never. But it’s snowing today, and we think that’s kinda awesome. Here are a few pictures and a quick video. Yay snow!

We’re about to launch a brand new and extremely cool CheapTweet feature. This feature will change the way you find deals, making it faster, easier and more fun to find the exact deals you’re looking for. You’ll learn a lot more about it soon.

Before its public debut, however, we’re providing an early sneak peak to our most loyal users. And as a reader of our blog, that’s you! If you’d like to try this feature before it becomes public, just click here to sign up. We’ll send you an email with more information. This is your chance to see the new CheapTweet before anyone else does!

We’re updating a few pages on CheapTweet.com to provide more information to CheapTweet visitors. Among other changes, there’s a revamped About CheapTweet page, which includes more detailed information about who we are, recent press mentions, etc…

And, there’s a brand new FAQ and Help page! If you ever have a question about how CheapTweet works or why something isn’t working the way you think it should, check here for answers. We’ll continue to add to this page as we grow. Let us know if you have a question that isn’t currently answered here!

If you want to stay up-to-date on the latest deals and CheapTweet news, become our fan on Facebook!

Every day, we’ll post links to great deals, as well as CheapTweet.com site updates, company news and pictures from various events. Feel free to ask questions in the discussion board or post links to your favorite deals.