Having reached the 100-follower milestone, it’s as good a time as any to reflect on my experience to date.

On Followers and Following

Who I Follow: For the most part, the only people I follow on Twitter are those that I have an ongoing relationship with (about 15 to 20 people) and thought leaders (about 35 people). In order for me to continue following someone they must have a high wheat-to-chaff ratio. Meaning, most of their tweets must be about topics I am interested in – not what they ate for lunch.

Loyalty: I am a rather loyal sort. If I follow someone, I follow them. The reason the list of people I follow is short (by Twitter standards) is because I read/scan most every tweet that comes in.

The Kawasaki Exception: Early on I followed Guy Kawasaki. He was/is an interesting Twitter user. But this guy (pun intended) doesn’t know when to stop! He sends out torrents of tweets each day. I couldn’t take it any more. He is the only person I unfollowed because of too many interesting tweets. FYI his post: “How to Pick Up Followers on Twitter” is pretty good except for his advice to follow everyone that follows you – ugh!

How I Found those I Follow: The best way of finding interesting people is to mine the following list of the people that I already follow.

Who I do Not Follow: Anyone else. I know, this makes me an anomaly on Twitter.  I don’t have the time to follow many more people. If I follow someone new and stick with them, I’ll usually remove someone else.

I Do Not Follow to be Followed: Most people that have huge follower lists also follow a huge number of people. How can someone follow 10,000 people? 1,000 people?  Really!? I can barely keep up with the 50 people I follow.

I Do Not Use Filters: Yesterday Mashable posted: ‘20 Ways to Filter your Tweets’. I’ve said, from the first time TweetDeck (pictured to the right) became popular, that the only reason someone needs it, is to filter out people they shouldn’t be following. To me, following people for the purpose of obtaining followers in return (most people seem to follow-back anyone that follows them) smacks of mutual fraud. There is no way anyone can realistically follow more than 100 or 200 people. For me 50 is about right. Filtering software, it seems to me, is only needed to filter out those that a person follows but has no intention of actually following. To users of TweetDeck (and similar filtering software) I say, the only people you should be following are those that you add to your ‘favourites’ filter list. You are misleading everyone else. Am I missing something here?

Crowd Sourcing Exception: I do acknowledge that people like Guy Kawasaki, Robert Scoble and Paul Thurrott follow tens of thousands of people to use them for crowd sourcing. They say as much on their podcasts. They can ask a question on Twitter and have hundreds answer it in seconds. But these same people are the first to use Twitter filtering software the second their questions are answered. Most who are followed by these tech celebrities are fooling themselves if they think their tweets are being read in return.

Few Real World Friend Followers: None of my family (close or extended) use Twitter. Virtually none of my real-world friends use Twitter. My nephew’s good friend Jarel Villarroya follows me. On my suggestion, two close friends set up twitter accounts, followed me, but were never heard from again.  Some clients and former clients follow me. A squad of people I have never met but have become virtual friends with over the years follow me. Beyond those 20 or so people, I do not know the remaining 80 or so people who follow me.

Related Services

Friendfeed: As you can read here, I joined friendfeed in early January 2009. I dabbled there for awhile. It is a compelling service – better than Twitter in most ways. I have had an ongoing dialogue with Davis Freeberg about this. Davis has largely abandoned Twitter for friendfeed and makes compelling arguments about why I should do the same. But, most of the world uses Twitter. Most importantly, most of the people I follow use only Twitter. If most of the people I follow used friendfeed, I might make that leap. But for now, Twitter remains my primary streamed social network feed.

Found Others through Mr Tweet: On the advice of Mashable, I used Mr Tweet in December 2008 to source some of the people I followed at that point.  Taking a look at Mr Tweet today, it seems to be a very different service. It now requires that you disclose your twitter ID and password to use it. It didn’t back then. I refuse to use any service that makes this demand.

Hash Tags: At the advice of Kevin Rose (Ten Ways to Increase Your Twitter Followers) I started using hash tags on February 9, 2009 (see how hash tags work here). Using hash tags really does generate followers. I would say that most of my followers have found me through my use of hash tags. I know this because most new followers follow me within minutes of my posting a tweet with a hash tag on a topic that interested them.

Twitter Chicklet: I added a twitter chicklet link into the top right of all my web properties. I don’t know if this resulted in followers or not. It can’t hurt. Of course I also added the Twitter Widget to the middle/right column of this blog.

Bio & Customized Profile Page: I also took Kevin Rose’s advice and filled in the bio pages on Twitter and added a customized profile page. Why not? I want people to know who I am. It ads to my overall Internet ‘brand’. I made my Twitter profile page look similar to the Daleisphere branding and the branding on my primary DaleDietrich.com website.

Quitter: In March 2009, I joined Quitter. Quitter emails you when someone stops following you on Twitter. It tells you what tweet you wrote just before you were dropped. I soon quit, Quitter. It was kind of a downer. I’m not about to arbitrarily tailor my tweets to maximize followers. If people aren’t interested in my tweets, I understand why they would stop following me. After all, I stop following people for lots of reasons. I’d guess 30 or so people have stopped following me so far.

Blocking Spam/Fake Followers: Part of the reason my follower numbers are low is that I actively block followers that seem to be spamming. I look at the profile of each person that follows me and block them if they appear to be following me for some nefarious reason. I can’t understand ‘followers’ that follow 50,000 people and are being followed by 50,000 others. When I see those kinds of ridiculous numbers I block them (I’ve blocked dozens like this). Other times you find followers with a single tweet that is some kind of marketing scam or sales pitch. Alternatively, these folks have an unending stream of sales pitch tweets and nothing else. They get blocked. Those with no image (ie: the brown image with blue circles pictured above) tend to get blocked. Most of these folks have no tweets. I’m not sure what to make of them.

Update: The fakefollowers service uses interesting criteria to determine what percentage of twitter followers are fake. A follower is considered ‘fake’ if:

• they have less than 2 followers
• they follow more than 1,000 others and don’t use TweetDeck
• they follow less than 2 others
• over 99% of their tweets contain hyperlinks
• they have never tweeted; or
• they have no real name

Sounds like a pretty good list. As of June 6, 2009 it says that 20% of my followers are fake, and 80% are true. Check your (or someone else’s) followers out here.

What Twitter Means to Me

Twitter Changed How I Use the Internet: When I joined Twitter, I simply didn’t ‘get it’. I had low expectations. Today it is an indispensible service. Much of the blog surfing and RSS-feed subscribing I did a year ago has been replaced by my Twitter feed. Those I follow are so good that news and blog posts on most every topic I care about now flow in to me effortlessly.

Tweeting Comes Naturally: Like blogging, tweeting comes naturally to me. If it felt like work, I wouldn’t do it. I am the kind of person that sends links in emails to friends and family if I find something on a topic that I know a friend or family member is interested in. Twitter is an efficient means of doing the same thing, with the added advantage that every recipient has chosen to receive my tweets – unlike friends and family members that may have felt spammed when receiving more of such emails than they would have liked.

A Means of Connecting with Like-Minded People: Virtual friendships have started and old one’s have become stronger because I tweet on topics my followers are interested in and I follow the tweets of those that have common interests with me. The symbiotic relationships that flow out of Twitter are terrific.

A Constant Companion: Thanks to my iPhone, PC and laptop, no matter where I am, I can check in and see ‘what’s happening’. I am rarely bored. Twitter provides a never ending stream of thought provoking information on the topics I care about.

Thought Leader: I want to be a thought leader. I work hard at providing interesting, relevant and original tweets to those that follow me. Thought leaders rightly earn high follower to following ratios. If they haven’t, they are not thought leaders.

The Next 100 Followers: I’m hoping it takes less than 13 months to garner my next 100 followers. To those that follow me, I’ll continue to try to post interesting and thought provoking tweets with links to articles on the topics I am, and hopefully you are, passionate about. Thanks so much!

Desktop Client – Twhirl

I use Twhirl as my desktop twitter application. I looked at TweetDeck but it was overkill and it takes up too much screen real-estate. I tried the gorgeous blu (works only on Vista and Windows 7), but it does not have an adjustable font. The default font is too small for my aging eyes. Twhirl is surprisingly feature rich but it takes awhile to figure out all the intricacies. I’ve tried others, but keep coming back to Thwirl.

iPhone App – Tweetie

Tweetie is terrific. I had previously used Twitterific and Twinkle on the iPhone but Tweetie ($2.99) satisfies me the most. Tweets are presented in bubbles similar to the iPhone’s SMS bubbles. Thankfully, the font is adjustable. Functions and information are an easy swish away. Twitterific does have the advantage of supporting both Twitter and friendfeed.

See also: 29 Twitter Apps for the iPhone Compared (Mashable)

Blog Integration Widget – Twitter Widget

I use Twitter Widget to feed my tweets into the right sidebar of my blogs. Prior to April 2, 2009, I had used Twitter Widget Pro on The Daleisphere and Twitter for WordPress on DaleDietrich.com, my iMedia Law Blog and my Video Game Law Blog (I used two different tools because for some reason Twitter Widget Pro didn’t work on my other blogs after my move to media temple. Thanks to Dave Zatz for his suggestions and inspiration here.

URL Compression Tools

URL compression tools are used to compress URL’s before embedding them in Tweets. There are many to choose from. I rotate between several:

• The TinyURL.com bookmarklet (available here) generates compressed links to the page I’m viewing directly from my Firefox toolbar. One click on the bookmarklet and a TinyURL to that page is added to my PC’s clip board for easy pasting into Twhirl.  I probably use this the most.
• Bit.ly has a similar bookmarklet tool accessible from the Firefox toolbar, but using it requires an extra click. It has the advantages of: (i) generating a smaller link (every letter counts on Twitter); and (ii) you can use Bit.ly to track how many people click through the link if you are so inclined – I’ve never been so inclined.
• DiggBar: As of April 2, 2009, simply typing ‘Digg.com/’ in front of any URL in any browser and then press Enter generates a compressed URL that you can copy and paste into your Tweet (See: DiggBar Launches Today! or watch the video below).

Note:  Regrettably, this DiggBar approach won’t work on the Daleisphere or any of my sites because long ago I added some special sauce in my headers to prevent my sites from being embedded in an iframe. I did this because some jack@ss was embedding all my posts into an iframe on his site and passing my site off as his own. Because of that my sites are locked out of this cool new tech. Grrrrr! I may revisit my approach to iframe in the future.

• Twhirl has a built in URL compression tool that I find too clumsy to use often. I much prefer how blu compressed URLs on the fly.

Reference:

• Twitter Toolbox: 70+ Awesome Twitter Apps, Mash-Ups, Plugins and Services
• 29 Twitter Apps for the iPhone Compared

Note

The contents of this post had originally been contained in my ‘Twitter Tips for Beginners’ post. However, I change the Twitter apps, tools and widgets I use  so frequently that I decided that a regularly updated post dedicated to the topic would be more useful. As such, I intend to update this post from time to time as my Twitter tools change – and they will change!

Since joining Twitter a few months back, I have wanted to understand how it overlapped/interacted with the web-content aggregator friendfeed. I looked at friendfeed at least two or three times and never quite ‘got it’ – until today.

Robert Scoble was a guest on the recent episode 81 of net@night. This guy is quite the friendfeed evangelist (Arrington suggests he’s addicted to it). So much so that the net@nite discussion made me want to take another look. Leo mentioned that Scoble had done a ‘how to’ type video on friendfeed. A quick Google search lead me to this very informative 26 minute video: ‘Robert Scoble: 20 Things About Friendfeed”:

What Does friendfeed Do?

friendfeed is not easy to understand out of the gate. Following along with the Scoble video, I was able to learn the basics, how to how to set it up and how powerful it can be.  A primary function of friendfeed is to aggregate all of your web activities, posts, pictures, comments etc. into one place. I added feeds from each of the following web services that I contribute too(click each to see the underlying feed):

• Digg.com
• Disqus
• Facebook
• IntenseDebate
• Last.fm
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• rss feeds from each of my Daleisphere, Video Game Law and iMedia Law blogs

Secondly, all my public web content will be streamed out, in real time, to those who choose to follow me on friendfeed, Twitter, Facebook etc.

Finally, I can follow others on friendfeed and have all of their public web content streamed out, in real time, to me – in one place.

[Jan 9, 2009 Update: I just noticed that Microsoft’s Windows Live ‘What’s New Feed’ function seems very similar to friendfeed.]

Addictive

I can see how friendfeed can become addicting. I initially set it to follow the same individuals that I currently follow on Twitter (those with friendfeed accounts that is – Dave Zatz, Davis Freeberg, Brent Evans).

I then expanded it to follow some of the diggirati that I respect such as Scoble himself, Michael Arrington, Paul Thurrott, Leo Laporte, Ed Bott, Ryan Block, Jason Calacanis etc. The quality of content (especially since CES 2009 is in full swing as I write this) is outstanding.  Clearly, following smart people with similar interests leads to fantastic results.

Search

The search feature is powerful. There are three normal ways to search friendfeed – your own content, your friends content or everyone’s content.

With all my content from around the web aggregated into one place, I can search all of my public-web content, going back for years in some cases, in one place. There is no need to traverse 8 different sites with eight different search engines to find my stuff.

Even more powerful, is the ‘Everyone’ content search. As I’m typing this post, the Palm Pre was just announced at CES. A simple search of ’Palm Pre’ in friendfeed found endless blog posts, comments, tweets, pictures etc. on the just-announced Palm Pre. Powerful stuff!

Advanced Search

You can granulize your search by content type. For example, you could search just for sub-content types from, say, flickr, or just tweets, or just blog posts etc. You can search by friend. Cool.

‘Best Of’ Feature

The “Best Of” feature, was particularly interesting. friendfeed users can effectively vote on what content is good by clicking on the ‘like’ button beside any entry. These ‘like’ votes are dynamically tallied such that if you click on “Best of”” (day/week/month), friendfeed will display the content that your peers/friends voted to be the best of that day, week, month. Terrific. This is a great way to surface the most interesting content. It’s kinda like “Digg.com for Smart People”.

Issues

Need a friendfeed Desktop App: Like Twitter, friendfeed is web-based. I use the twhirl application to access my Twitter feeds. I would like a similar application to access my friendfeed feeds. They must exist. Any suggestions?

[Note: I purchased the Nambu iPhone App ($1.99) to access Twitter and friendfeed on my iPhone. It seems to work well enough – but it is annoying to set up.]

Loosing Control of Comments: I’m new to this. I’m concerned that if someone comments on one of my blog posts within friendfeed, that I’ll loose those comments. I’d rather have them comment directly in my blog, not on friendfeed. I know Disqus and IntenseDebate were talking about importing those comments back. As I write this, I don’t know the status of backhauling friendfeed comments into the source blog’s database. As you can see below, IntenseDebate pulled in comments I made on this post from within friendfeed.

[Jan 9, 2009 Update: As you can see from my first comment below, Intense Debate pulls comments on a post made in friendfeed back into the blogger’s comments (details here). While it appears that Disqus is working on integration (see here) and there are some tools to do this with Disqus (see here), near as I can tell there is no formal solution for Disqus yet.]

No Comment Character Count: You can setup friendfeed to Tweet your friendfeed comments (as I have done). Twitter permits only 140 characters per Tweet. friendfeed permits more but it does not tell you how many characters you have typed in a comment. If you type more than 140, they get truncated in Twitter. Dang! I note that Nambu has the same limitation.

Outbound Feed Publishing to Twitter: Yikes, I quickly learned not to include every feed from every service in my outbound feed to Twitter. This was a bit much. As of right now, I only publish friendfeed comments, and new blog post entries to Twitter. Not sure what I’ll do with facebook status updates yet. I attempt to keep my Twitter feed more professional than my Facebook world. And I don’t want every comment I make everywhere on the web to appear in my Twitter feed. That’s just noisy overkill.

Conclusion

Will I continue to use it? Only time will tell. It is certainly more interesting, useful and impressive than I had expected. If I can find a good desktop app to run it, I probably will.