Stranger Danger: Twitter Version

I heard that some peeps have checked out the top Tweeps around and have followed them, and possibly gotten a stream of automatic followers on your side. Just wanted to highlight that not all of these people who follow you are worth following back - it would be a good idea to click on their profile and check out their tweet contents...and make a personal judgment call.

Most are just spammers who will utilize the age old trick of following you, making you feel obliged to follow them back, and then they will unfollow you after a certain period of time to artificially inflate the number of their own followers. From the ones I've seen, anyone who touts themselves as an online entrepreneur, is really into online marketing, or has a username like getrickquick falls under the extremely dodgy category.

Useful tools:
Qwitter will help you monitor when someone quits following your Tweets (if you're keen to know).
Socialtoo is a beefed up version of that, plus offers automatic follows, unfollows and a whole lot more. Socialtoo allows you to tune out their own robot spammers. It also can send direct messages to those who follow you (though some of the big names seem very against this very impersonal approach and have no qualms about unfollowing those who do so). Automated messages felt rather uncomfortable to me as well, but as always, it's entirely your call! No harm trying it.

Will end off with Robert Scoble who believes that "The secret to Twitter is how many people you are listening to, not how many people are listening to you."


Some Twitter Basics for starters

Now that you've gotten your Twitter account up and running, a great way to dive straight into what the Interwebs are saying about Twitter would be the Alltop Twitter page. The really popular Tweeps can be found at this page for a head start on people you might want to follow. (On a side note, Alltop in general is a great aggregation of some great content out there, on a whole list of topics. Just head on to their home page and enter any search term you might be interested in! Those who like instruction manuals and use them will like this About page.)

Back to Twitter...
Nothing is complete without a Twitter search engine, which allows you to check out what others are saying about a particular topic right now. Perfect for monitoring conversations about your brand, product or service, etc!


By Dorothy Poon
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Top Twitterers? Check this out!

How to find the top twitterers in your city!

This is interesting! Terms like twitterholics and twitterlocals litter this website, which shows how the use of twitter has permeated a country (here, they measure it by Tweets within 5 miles of San Francisco.) Twitter, Jaiku, and other social media tools have taken the mobile world by storm - you can now update your friends via facebook, and smses about your location and what you're doing.

Talk about social networking! It is revolutionizing at such an amazing speed that web users can haste keep up, much less get acquainted with each application before the next new thing springs up.

check out this website too: 35 Ways to Stream Your Life

streaming your life on the web? now, that's a first! one can only wonder what they'll come up with next!

By Rachel Chia
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Why Twitter Matters

This article is for anyone who wonders why Twitter's such a huge craze, and its business implications. For sure, there are many people who use Twitter every day, making it as indispensable as a mobile phone in Singapore. My question is, is it really as indispensable as people say it is? I've tried it out, but it hasn't really been incorporated into my daily life as none of the people in my social circle use it. Perhaps I need to start following strangers first!

Will Twitter stay and eventually become big enough to go public? How viable is it to monetize the system? After all, it has become successful partly because it is a free service and therefore anyone can use it. Or is it really true what is said about Twitter, that it's not the core technology but the community that makes it what it is?

By Stephanie Siow