Twitter for Dummies - Laura Fitton [67]
• FriendorFollow (http://friendorfollow.com): Came onto the Twitter scene more recently than Twitter Karma, and its interface is a little bit easier to understand. The FriendorFollow interface tells you who your mutual follows are, whom you follow without being followed back, and who follows you without you following them back. You can then pick and choose whom to follow and whom to stop following. FriendorFollow connections don’t automatically opt you into individuals’ device updates, so it’s okay to use the tool to connect to many people, even if you have device updates turned on for your account.
• Twitter Karma (www.dossy.org/twitter/karma): Offers you a way to see whom you follow, who follows you, and which users both follow you and are followed by you. You can also use Twitter Karma to add followers, as well as remove users whom you no longer want to follow. But Twitter Karma tends to select Notifications On as the default setting when you add a new follower from Twitter Karma’s interface, so be sure to double- check that user’s profile if you don’t want to receive her notifications by text message.
Find new people to follow.
• We Follow (www.wefollow.com): User-generated Twitter directory launched by Digg Founder Kevin Rose at SXSW in April 2009. Associates up to three hashtags with each twitterer who lists themselves in the directory and then presents the most followed individuals and accounts for each category. Because the results are searched by follower numbers, it’s a particularly good way to find the top celebrities, musicians, journalists, politicians, and so on who are using Twitter at any given time.
• Twellow (www.twellow.com): Structured like a Yellow Pages for Twitter, allows you to find new followers based on category, name, location, or trending topics. If a Twitter user has been active long enough to have a few tweets on the record, as well as a bio, you can find him on Twellow. If you search for yourself on Twellow, you can claim your profile, meaning that you contact Twellow and prove that you are you in order to get editing privileges for it, and then tweak it to categorize yourself so that others can find you based on your interests, services, or professional categories.
• Twitter (http://search.twitter.com or your Home screen): We’d be remiss not to remind you here that you can find new people to follow on Twitter itself in three useful ways. Twitter’s people search function is ironically the weakest. Even to find a specific individual that you know to be on Twitter, you’re often better off searching Google for his first and last names and the word Twitter. Twitter also offers a list of suggested users, and while there has been some controversy around who gets to be on that list and who does not, it includes some pretty interesting accounts and is worth browsing. But to really fine-tune your interests, periodically search Twitter itself for tweets about topics close to your heart and unique amongst your interests. You never know who you might find. Click on a user’s name in any tweet he’s written and peruse his last page or so of tweets. You get a surprisingly good feel for who they are as a person that way. It’s very cool.
• 100TWT (http://100twt.com): This site simply combines the streams of the 100 most-followed Twitter accounts. So while it overlaps heavily with the Suggested Users list, it does a nice job of letting you skim random tweets from the Twitter heavyweights in a combined screen. Poke around from time to time, and you may notice some cool ideas coming from equally cool people.
Find users by location. TwitterLocal (www.twitterlocal.net) used to use Twitter’s XMPP feed to show what users were in what locations. Because Twitter has its XMPP feed switched