Twitter galore! - Twiends & Tweetdeck

I've signed up with Twiends, a system that is supposed to give you a chance to find people who share your interests on Twitter and get "credits" for following them. Fortunately credits are free (and given my experience I would not suggest paying for them!).

My first attempt at using it left me with a lot of marketers who signed up quickly to get my credits, so I turned it off for a while while I browsed and signed up to follow people I was interested in and blocked or reported most of the rest. I was also slightly concerned about the logistics of following that many people back, since a lot of useful posts can get lost in the noise.

This morning I ran into Twiends again. I set up an account for a client, set up one for me, and turned my other one back on. The results were interesting, to say the least. Basically, whole sets of people are using the "follow everyone" option (easily detected as they all signed up for the three accounts simultaneously).

Since huge chunks of people obviously just want a follow-back and credits (I'll point out I'm not involved in Alaskan oil, and leave it at that), instead of wading through all the people following me to see who to follow, I'll leave it a day, see who unfollows because they've already got the credits for signing up, and then go through the remainder to see who I should follow. Since many of these multiple-sign-ups are using systems that automatically unsubscribe people who don't follow back in 24 hours, it should clear a lot of the spam before I have to deal with it.

I don't use auto-unsubscribe, by the way. If I'm following you, it's because I want to hear what you're saying, not because I expect a followback. I wish more people would extend the same courtesy.

My opinion of Twiends? Well, it defintely does what it says, and gets you followers. How interested those followers are in your topics? That varies. So far I have blocked ten, but have left two and followed two more.

And a very big recommendation to Tweetdeck as the best bit of free software I've found this year. Scheduled Tweets, managing multiple accounts simultaneously, and making it really easy to detect spammers. It will get its own entry shortly, but I've been playing with it for a week now and I'm still finding new ways to shamelessly exploit it.

Opinion of Tweetdeck? Get this one: It's free, it does exactly what it says on the tin, and then more.