Bear, Diah and Pasha

Weeding out bad followers on your Twitter

Posted on the July 29th, 2010 under Bear time by papabear

This entry applies to those who are using Twitter as a tool to do whatever it is that you do. If you are not using Twitter, you can skip the entry and go straight to the comment form and tell me that you do not use Twitter… … And if you are a celebrity using Twitter, this entry does not apply to you too…

Assuming that you are using Twitter to promote something, you would need to have lots of followers. In order to have many followers, you have to have something that attracts people to follow you or you can start following as many people as you can and hopefully some would then follow you back in return. The latter since to be a workable method to build up your followers despite that it is a time consuming effort.

But then, there is a problem to that method. Twitter impose a limit to the number of people that you can follow based on some caculated ratio that is only known to them. That means, if you only have 1 or 10 or 100 followers, you could only follow up to 2000 people. After that, the ratio kicks in and you must have some number of followers before you can follow 2001 people. This is mainly put in place to get rid of spammers and other undesirable people.

So, from time to time you would get people following you and some people, such as I, would then follow them back in the intention of having mutual benefits of following each other. Like anything else in this world, there would be some bad people who would follow you just to get you to follow them back so that they can increase their followers. Once you have followed them, they would them un-follow you so that they can start following someone else and increase their follower again. You would end up with less followers thus you are unable to add more people to follow… Bad eh!

What can you do? I think that there are many tools out there to help you manage this. My favorite is FriendorFollow. This is a site where you can check/do 3 things.

1. People that you are following but they are not following you back
2. People that are following you but you are not following them
3. People that you are following and they are following you back

I make use of no. 1 and 2 a lot. No.1 is for me to remove those who have stopped following me. You don’t follow me, why should I follow you unless you have something that I really like.

No. 2 is used when I want to return the favor to those who take the trouble to follow me. But when they misbehaved, I would then use no.1 on them…

By using this, I can weed out any bad followers as easy as 1 2 3…

The service is Free! No registration required. Just key in your Twitter ID on the front page and then use the Following, Fans, and Friends Tabs accordingly. You must log on to your Twitter if you need to follow or unfollow someone. FriendorFollow is at http://friendorfollow.com/

Happy Twitting!

Popularity: 2% [?]

Tweet With Me

Posted on the November 28th, 2008 under Blog by papabear

Today I feel like sharing about my Twitter and what do I use it with. Twitter is one of those so called micro blogging tools  and the only other similar thing out there is Plurk. I have seen Plurk with its fancy time line display stuffs but somehow I am still sticking to Twitter, which I find simpler and more straight forward. Furthermore, with the number of followers that I have right now, it would make it harder for me to move away from it.

Here are the tools or programs that I am currently using to complement my Twitter:

TwitterFox – I just need to see what are my friends and and the people I follow talk about and it would be not practical for me to log in to my Twitter account and refresh it all the time to see the latest tweet. With TwitterFox, an add-on to Firefox, this is done automatically and I have the option to reply as well as put in my own tweet. This is a must have for those who are following the tweets.

TweetLater – This is a powerful program that allows you to schedule your tweets, auto follow those who follow you and many more things. So far I only use this to auto follow those who follow me and send welcome and thank you message to my new follower.

Popularity: 41% [?]

Loving My Firefox

Posted on the November 11th, 2008 under Blog by papabear

I love Firefox not because many claim that it is the safest web browser in the world. To me, there is no such thing as safe surfing on the internet. It is just like there is no such thing as a car that is totally safe to drive. You just need to be careful and not do some stupid things while you are at it.

At the same time, many claim that Firefox is the fastest web browser in the world. There is some truth in that statement when running it side by side to the fat Internet Explorer from Microsoft. However, when it is timed against Google Chrome, that opinion might not really hold 100% as some sites are loaded faster on Chrome compared to Firefox.

So, if those are not the reason to fall in love and to be still in love with a fox that is on fire, what is it then?

Popularity: 23% [?]