Eli the Computer Guy

Archive for the ‘Twitter’ Category

Twitter has finally released a little upgrade for their site.  They have debuted “Lists”.  It’s a way to categorize the people that you are following.

You can now create different lists of people you follow and easily divide the people you are following into them.  So if you follow politics, technology and local businesses you can now create lists for these different groups.  You just highlight the list you want to look at and you only see Tweets from these lists.

It’s a stupid little tool that isn’t very sophisticated, or really very impressive.  But if you actually use Twitter it will be an invaluable way to sort through the barrage of Tweets in a given day.

Direct Message Spam within Twitter has become a nightmare not just because everyone hates spam, but because Twitter offers no way to delete a large number of Direct Messages easily.  You have to go through and delete messages one by one.  With the amount of Spam I get this becomes a waste of time.  Thankfully DM Whacker can now delete all of your Direct Messages with a couple clicks of the mouse.

It is important to know that DM Whacker is a bookmarklet and not a web or desktop based piece of software.  What this means is that you drag the bookmarklet to the Navigation bar.  You then go to the Direct Message page within your Twitter account and then click on the DM Whacker Button.

You answer a question or two and then it goes through and erases all of your messages.  It’s a snap to use and it seemed to have no problem with Twitter.

You can check it out at  http://dcortesi.com/tools/dm-deleter/

After a few months of playing around with Twitter I ended up following thousands of people that I didn’t care about.  I wanted to stop following all of these people, but the manual process to unfollow people was so time consuming I never got around to it. Thankfully the guys over at CloudAppers.com have given us a solution.

They created a simple web app that auto-unfollows everyone for you.  You just plug in your username and password for Twitter and it does the rest.  After about 10 minutes you’re back to following nobody.

There doesn’t seem to be any weird marketing with this, and you don’t need to subscribe to any mass market news letters.  You just enter your info, and sit back.

Check it out at http://cloudappers.com/2009/03/unfollow-everyone-on-twitter/

Digsby is a phenomenal little application that I have been hoping someone would develop for awhile now.  It is a desktop based application that connects to your web email accounts, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and much more.  From this one little app you can keep track of everything from IM’s to email to Tweets.

Whenever I get a new email/ update/ tweet a little window pops up to show me.  I can just click on the link in the Digsby bar and see all of the Tweets from people I’m following.  I can even update my Facebook status straight from the application.

You just download the application, run the setup wizard and start adding accounts.  All in all I have no complaints.  What I like best about the application is that since you actually install it on your computer you do not have to worry about random problems with Digsby servers.  Many of the other apps that I have tested for social networking are web based and depending on the time of day, or the mood of Bill Gates they can either run well, or not at all.

Check them out at http://www.digsby.com/

This is really a great tool!

Apparently the key to gaining followers in Twitter is all about the quantity of Tweets you can blast out.  I recently moved my blog to a new server and had an interesting experience.

As I have said my blog automatically Tweets to Twitter whenever a new post is created.  And I use Autoblogged to automatically create posts from the RSS feeds of other sites. I moved my blog over to a virtual server so that I could have more power to run scripts and ability to customize my site better.

I setup Autoblogged and my Twitter plug-in and they seemed to work great.  Autoblogged was chugging away creating posts, and Twitter was getting a nice barrage of Tweets.  After 10 hours I took a look at my Twitter account and was very happy to find that I had gained over 100 followers.  As I was happily patting myself on the back I clicked on the link from one of my Tweets to make sure everything worked OK.  To my surprise I encountered a 500 error (500 errors means there’s a problem with the server).  I didn’t go to the wrong page on my site I just got a white screen with a 500 error code and some less then helpful advice.  I then clicked on links on the other Tweets that had been posted.  To my surprise all the links were bad!

I realized I had made a mistake with my web server configuration and fixed it, but…

This means I gained over 100 followers while posting garbage! This makes me think that if I could create a script that would auto Tweet every 30 seconds, I could easily gain followers without having to do much for it.  If the script was created it would have to phrase the Tweets in such a way that the spam filters within Twitter would not block them. As long as you get past the spam filters you could easily gain 50-100 followers every day.