Filed under: Social Software, web 2.0, Web
Two new Twitter ideas that miss the mark
Everybody says there's no right or wrong way to use Twitter, but sometimes a ridiculous Twitter app comes along to make me wonder whether that's true. Right now there are two of them: Tweetstalk and Twollow. Tweetstalk lets you "stalk" a Twitter user, reading his or her tweets without formally following. Twollow automatically follows anybody who posts the keywords you specify. I'm conflicted about these two services. Tweetstalk is a Firefox plugin that adds a "stalk" button next to the follow button on users' Twitter pages: click it to subscribe to their tweets without following them. This doesn't do anything you can't do by going to a user's Twitter page and reading it. But if you intend to do it on an ongoing basis, you might as well let him or her know you're doing it by following.
Twollow could be useful for business Twitter accounts, and marketers who want to reach out to people who are discussing their clients. Depersonalizing it by making it automatic hardly seems productive to me, though. Why not use search.twitter.com to see who's talking about a topic, and decide whether to follow them yourself? Otherwise, you might end up following some really lame people, based on only one of their tweets.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
boogster1 said 2:10PM on 11-23-2008
No offence, but that app shown on that screenshot is named "Fuzzysquid". Sorry for spoiling that pixelization. ;-(
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Jay Hathaway said 2:11PM on 11-23-2008
Oh, that's an image from the Tweetstalk site. I didn't pixelate it myself, so no offense taken!
Bryan Price said 4:28PM on 11-23-2008
I just wanted the domo icon. Thank you fuzzysquid!
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Jamie said 6:49PM on 11-23-2008
Actually you don't need that Tweetstalk thing to get updated by someone's Tweets without following formally. You can use RSS for that! I use Google reader! I also check out Twitter search (formerly called Summize) to even follow conversations.
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