It's not that hard frankly! I've attached a graph showing the last three months of followers and following for the @web_cardiff account, and you can see the pattern clearly: The green line is the bot. It follows a bunch, waits a few days and unfollows those who didn't follow back. Repeat. (My graph isn't 100% accurate, but you can see the numbers for yourself: followers / 'friends'.)

What do you think? Is this bad practice? In this case, the information isn't bad - a few links go to the owner's site, but most point to genuinely useful resources. Friendly spam or useful resource worth promoting in this way?

So it turns out that making Twitter lists is really boring. Still, if it means an end to the noise that was #followfriday, then it's worth a bit of effort up front. My lists are (and will forever be) a work in progress. I have made five groups so far, and in each I have included mostly those who I personally get a lot of value out of. I've tended to leave out the big celebs who already get too much exposure, but the likes of Stephen Fry and Simon Pegg do still appear.

My lists so far:

• South Wales types
• Quality geeks
• Creative types
• Entertainers
• Newsy

@SarahNicholas/imaginary-ppl, @worldofoddy/funny-and-or-interesting, @dsml/smarterthanyouravebear, and of course, @JohnGreenaway/occasional-hat-wearer

A simple mashup of the Twitter cartoon bird identity and 'Y Ddraig Goch' that appears on the Welsh flag. It's not finalised yet, but it's nearly there. When I look at it again in a few day, I'll probably spot exactly what needs to be tweaked to make it just right. Of course, feedback at this stage is often useful too. :)

I'm thinking about putting him on a grassy backdrop, to imitate the Welsh flag even more.

Foomen against Twibbons

Ironically, now I want to create more ironic Twibbons! :)

The idea is simple:

1. Send out a tweet like '#blockparty for Sarah Palin' and encourage your friends to get on board.
2. Twitter search for something like sarah palin i'm OR im OR fan OR supporter  -not :), and then block all the deranged Sarah Palin fans you can find.
3. Visit @AKGOVSarahPalin and block lots of her followers.
4. Pick another target on another boring day, and do it all again.
   

There are many things Twitter could do to encourage the use of favourites more. I like the idea of putting a users last favoured tweet right on their profile, something like I've mocked up here.

Here's an innocent link being shared on Twitter:

Free Font FP Head Pro by Fontpartners http://post.ly/T7r Font72

I don't want to pick on @imjustcreative, but this is a complete link fail. It could only be worse if it used a framing short URL.

When you click on the link you get taken to Graham's Posterous blog, then to fontsquirrel. They appear to be the vendor, but confusingly their download button takes you offsite and dumps you on fontpartners.com. You have finally arrived at your destination, but now you have to remember what the font you wanted was called and find it yourself.

This is the link you needed in the first place: http://fontpartners.com/fpHead_pro.html

Spot anything wrong? Yup, that's right, no 'free download' link. Just the option to buy at the top.

In the time it has taken me to compose this, @imjustcreative replied to my moan on Twitter:

@Foomandoonian now ur just being lazy and whingy, just be thankful you have a link at all :)

Yeah, thanks buddy.

About a year ago I gave up caring who started following me on Twitter, largely because of the proliferation of blatant spammers. I put up a note on my bio saying that if people really wanted me to reciprocate, the should send me a message, and I would certainly follow back if they were an interesting real person, and not some spam account (or worse). This still seems perfectly reasonable to me.

More recently though I decided I should take a more active interest in those who choose to follow me. I started using the excellent Topify, which makes it easy to identify spammers and I check out anyone who seems interesting.

Consequently, I've spotted an annoying trend.

There are many, many users who follow about 200 more people than follow them back. They are taking advantage of the fact that about half of the people that they follow, will follow them back! For whatever reason a large number of people feel it is the done thing to just blindly follow back anyone who follows them, however spammy, offensive or bizarre the new follower is! Personally, I don't understand this behaviour in the slightest: I don't want spam in my Twitter stream - so I don't follow spammers. It's simple.

Nonetheless, if you want to steadily grow your follower base, add 100 new people a day. Then, after you've been doing this for a few days, go back and unfollow all those who didn't follow you in return, while continuing to follow new people. This way your ratio will always be near enough 1:1, making you look legitimate and popular. Eventually, when you reach an acceptable target (say, 10,000 followers) you can have a big purge and get rid of a lot of the mindless sheep you have accumulated. Say, 20-30% of them. Now it looks like you are a power user. Any new visitors to your profile will assume that you are hugely important and that maybe they should listen to you too.

So there you go, now you can claim to be an SEO-demigod, and have huge numbers of low-quality followers seeming to back it up.

Or you could just use Twitter like a normal person.

Twooshes: 147
(Messages with exactly 140 characters)

Twitter ranking: 29,313
Being the 30,000th most popular actually doesn't seem too bad!

TwitterGrade: 99.5 (out of 100)
I don't know what that means either!

@ replies
Apparently I only reply to 41.65% of messages directed at me. I suspect a lot of those @ messages are in fact retweets, but I should probably still try to improve this percentage.

My first sixteen tweets

The usual noob rubbish (in rererse chronology)

• Gah! No internet!
  1:21 AM Sep 18th 2007
• Check out my new monster! http://www.flickr.com/photos/jawboneradio/1393309763/
  7:00 PM Sep 16th 2007
• photagger.com The Fundamentals of Illustration.
  10:17 AM Sep 1st 2007
• Bighugelabs.com
  12:27 PM Aug 30th 2007
• I've never been able to link my Twitter with my IM! GRR!
  3:43 PM Aug 23rd 2007
• Work boring.
  7:49 AM Aug 20th 2007
• C'mon weekend!
  4:33 AM Aug 17th 2007
• Trying sandles for the first time. I have cold toes!
  1:01 PM Aug 9th 2007
• Twitter RSS working?
  9:13 AM Jul 12th 2007
• Hello?
  2:54 PM Jul 9th 2007
• Testing transmission...
  9:02 AM Jul 6th 2007
• Train delayed *again* because of 'a defect on the line. Sigh!
  1:26 AM Jan 26th 2007
• Wanting to go to bed, but playing with Twitter instead. Just watched E2 of the new 24 - not so hot :(
  4:17 PM Jan 25th 2007
• Yay, Phone working :) 2:26 PM Jan 25th 2007
• Not having much luck setting up my phone or IM!
  2:17 PM Jan 25th 2007
• Trying twitter for the first time...
  1:54 PM Jan 25th 2007

Info from: Twitter Counter, TweetStats, Twitter Grader and My Tweet 16.

   

Click here to download:

Fun_facts_about_me_and_Twitter.zip (22 KB)