Monday, February 16, 2009

Twitter and TweeterGetter? bad idea?

In the past few days, I've been seeing quite a buzz on the TweeterGetter site. There's also been a lot of talk about its existence, and whether it is a good idea to subscribe to. I have thought about it for a while, and finally decided not to sign up for it, and here are my reasons:
  1. Impersonal: Though I know that not all twitter followers are people I know, they are still people that have likely followed me for a reason and a common interest. I believe that with TweeterGetter, this factor will get lost, and I will end up with people that I may have nothing in common with.
  2. Quality over quantity: Some people may find satisfaction in having 20,000 followers, and get a sense of accomplishment from it, and these are sometimes the one that would find satisfaction in a service like TweeterGetter. Although, sometimes, these same people are the ones I see posting Twitts to the effect of: "Cleaning up my Twit Spammers, not fun", etc ... I would like to try to not become one of those people, and have spam control that I manipulate.
  3. Really? 10000?: I mean seriously, I don't run a known blog, I believe in networking, and I have a fairly nice LinkedIn profile, and Facebook profile, but these are network connections that are meaningful. From a Twitter perspective, 10000 followers, or even following 10000 people sounds absurd. I have always wondered how people can even keep track of 10000 sending updates. Right now, I only have a couple of hundred followers, and I myself following about that much as well, and I find it overwhelming to keep in touch with everything that's going on.
  4. TweetDeck API Hog!: so, I have followers in the hundreds only, and sometimes I find my TweetDeck API hit its limit per hour. Yeah, yeah I know I can change the request intervals, and fetch use profiles in a browser to save on APIs, but imagine with some 10000 followers! I would think I'd need to check maybe once every 15 minutes to keep under my API call limit. Of course, that is a bit of a mundane problem, but as far as I'm concerned, it still is one.
  5. Username and Password: TweeterGetter is one more place I'd need to plug in my Twitter username and password. That being said, I have to admit, that it irks me that people always complain that they have to input their username and password for a 3rd party service. I happen to see this on Lifehacker often times. People, if you don't want to try the new service which requires your username and password, then don't, there's no use in complaining that this 3rd party company is doing you a disservice by offering a service that would require your username and password. You want your cake and eat it too? I digress....this is a topic for another post.
If you are one who is serious about networking, I really do discourage you from using tools such as TweeterGetter, as it will only increase the likelihood of spam, and would be counter productive to what you are trying to accomplish. These are my 2 cents on this topic. What are your thoughs?

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