By Mikal E. Belicove|For Entrepreneur.com|March 12, 2010

For the past five months, Justin Vincent’s Twitter application went largely unnoticed by the social networking and microblogging site, until last week that is, when Tweetminer was randomly suspended by Twitter.

Founded in October of 2009, by last week, with little to no advertising or marketing, Tweetminer had grown to include 3,000 users. Justin, a solo entrepreneur, is constantly improving the application based on customer feedback and requests, and since he’s a one-man operation, he takes a very active and hands-on approach to every aspect of his business, including customer support, where he alone answers all customer questions. And, as a programmer and stand-up guy, he knows better than most what it takes to stay in compliance when developing and managing a third-party app like Tweetminer.

After Tweetminer’s suspension, one might think Justin’s customers would have been angry with him. After all, many of them pay between $5 and $20 a month to use the service (which helps individuals and businesses grow and maintain a targeted following on Twitter). Not so. Tweetminer’s customers quickly rallied to Justin’s defense and began a Twitter campaign using the hash tag #FreeTheTweetMiner3000 (the number 3,000 was chosen because Tweetminer has about that many customers).

While the ad-hoc campaign to reinstate the app was in full swing, Justin worked with Twitter to…

Continue reading Lessons From the Sandpit: How Tweetminer Got its Twitter Back On…