I posted about a new URL shortening service today called Tweetbucks, the latest service to let you earn money from your Twitter links.

I’m still of two minds about whether the rise of these kind of services is a good thing. On the one hand, I can see why some people would use them. If you have hundreds of thousands of followers and post a lot of links then you would be able to earn a nice little bonus every month.

Take Ashton Kutcher for example with close to 2 million followers. If only 1% of his followers click on a link he posts, that’s still 20,000 clicks. Now if only 25% actually visit the ad, that’s still 5,000 clicks on the advertisement. Now imagine he posts 4 or 5 links a day every day. You do the math!

However, what’s the cost of placing banners on links you post. Will people unfollow? Will a lot of followers not click on it because they know an advertisement banner is on it? Would you trust someone recommending a product if they always placed advertisements on the ads?

Personally, if I had a huge amount of followers I’d be looking at a different way of making money through Twitter. Surely there’s a better way of making money from followers than spamming them with links all the time?

What’s your opinion on all of this?

Kevin

On a side note, as a webmaster, I am not keen on this type of service. As I explained a month or so ago on BloggingTips, I hate services who wrap frames around content on my sites . Therefore I have added a Frame Breaker to Time To Tweet to stop people making money from content I have taken the time to write.

The way I see it : if you pay for the domain, pay for hosting every month and spend hours writing content for a site you don’t appreciate people wrapping banners around it and trying to piggyback off of your hard work!

One of the people I follow swore in one of his tweets today. I got me thinking that generally speaking, not many people swear on Twitter. Not that this is a bad thing.

Though I must admit, I found it refreshing to see someone use a swear word on Twitter as most of us use ‘bad language’ in real life. I don’t swear all the time but I do use swear words a lot whilst out with friends or out drinking (who doesn’t). I can understand why people find it offensive but the way I see it, they’re just words.

However, I’m not ignorant and I know when not to use such language (hint : probably not a good idea to use it in an interview or when you meet your in laws for the first time!). I never use bad language in blog or forum posts that I have written because I know some people find it offensive.

Should Twitter considered be in the same light or is it ok to swear on Twitter because it’s more personal?

Personally, I don’t see the need to swear on Twitter but unless someone is using several swear words in every tweet, I doubt I would unfollow them. What would you do?

 Loading ...

I came across a special offer a few weeks ago about a new Twitter product which is due for release next month. The owner, Ryan Cameron, was looking for 500 twitter users to try the beta version of his script and help spread the word about it.

According to the special offer page the script will let you :

• Manage multiple Twitter accounts!
• Compile unlimited lists of over 20,000+ targeted twitter users in less then 30 minutes!
• Mass follow these targeted users with the click of a button!
• Send private messages in bulk with the click of a button! (Twitter limit is 100 per hour)
• Bulk Unfollow all users not following back with the click of a button

There seems to be a new Twitter script released every other week at the moment but I was intrigued about Twitter Friend Follower so I contacted the owner Ryan Cameron, and thankfully, he was more than happy to answer some questions for you guys.

Hope you enjoy the interview

For readers who have not come across you on the web before, can you tell us a little about yourself and give a brief description of your experience on the net.

Well, I’ve been a full-time internet marketer since 1998. I got my start as a teenager and haven’t looked back. The net has certainly changed since 1998. It was a lot easier back then because most people had no clue that you could actually earn a living promoting products online.

I’ve learned a lot in those 11 years about every aspect of this game. My true passion is creating products and designing websites.

How long have you been using Twitter?

For a longest time I kept hearing about this thing called Twitter, so in March 2009 I decided to checked it out. Now I can’t get enough. I think it’s definitely the future of online communication, not just for regular people, but also internet marketers and business owners. It allows you to communicate directly with your potential customers in seconds.

Why did you want to develop a Twitter follower script?

Twitter Friend Follower 2009 is actually a standalone desktop application which
runs on the PC (with a MAC version on the way).

Well, frankly I was sick of all the manual labor needed to manage multiple twitter accounts. I wanted something that would automate all those tedious chores; like clicking repetitively to follow and unfollow users.

Can you tell us a little more about TwitterFriendFollower and what it can help Twitter users do?

Basically the whole idea behind Twitter Friend Follower is to allow you to save hours of time by automating all those things you hate to do manually.

TFF 2009 does the following:

• Collects user IDs from any ‘followers’ or ‘following’ page and follows them automatically with the click of a button.
• You can unfollow all users not following you back. This is essential since Twitter sets limits on the amount of users you can follow. You need to purge users not following back if you ever want to grow your list.
• Direct Messaging in bulk. One click of a button and you can send a message to hundreds of users in minutes.
• Plus much more. I don’t want to ruin the surprise… You’ll have to try it yourself.

All I can say is that after testing out the beta version earlier today I was grinning from ear to ear! One simple click of a button and a minute later I had followed 300 new users. I can’t wait for people to try it out.

How much will Twitter Friend Follower cost?

The price is still up in the air, but I can promise it will be very affordable. Also, there will be a free trial version so everyone can test it out themselves.

The release date for Twitter Friend Follower has been set for 25th June. I will let you guys know closer to the time as I think at the very least it would be worth testing it out using the free trial.

A huge thank you to Ryan Cameron for taking part in this interview. If you have any questions about the script please leave a comment and Ryan will do his best to get back to you when he can

Twitter Friend Follower

The other day I got an @reply from MrTweet. The message said “EzyBlogger recommended you to @MrTweet, boosting your reputation. Check it out: http://cli.gs/mMQDNd”.

The message was generated because EzyBlogger started using MrTweet, a service I tried out a month or so ago (it’s actually pretty good!).

The message reminded me that any user can reply to you, whether you are following them or not (or vice versa). Clearly, this is something which can be abused.

How the @Reples system could be used for evil

lf you are using Twitter through their main site (i.e. not through an application like TweetDeck), then there is 3 ways you can interact with followers. You can :

• View tweets from your followers in the home page dashboard.
• View messages which reference you (i.e. the @USERNAME page).
• View direct messages

I have spoke about users are using auto replies to thank people for following them through direct messages, which can make checking for real direct messages a pain. However, this is only a real problem if you are following a lot of new people on a regular basis.

For me, the @Replies (i.e. @USERNAME) option is incredibly useful, particularly if you speak directly to other users or get a lot of retweets. But I believe it can be abused.

What if, for example, a famous actor said something offensive on television which upset a lot of people. People who were pissed off at the actor could express their anger directly by tagging them constantly. If thousands of people did this it would make it impossible for the actor to check genuine replies. You could argue that the actor deserves such a response but what if a community/group decided to do this to someone for no reason?

In theory, a script could be designed to tweet randomly tagging people, which would be useful for spammers as they could promote their website/service to millions of people (it wouldn’t surprise me if the script already exists!).

They could also use it to continually tag someone, which would fill up their @Replies page and make it unuseable. Users would then have to block/report them but there are scripts available which make setting up new Twitter accounts quick and easy so what’s stopping from doing it over and over with new accounts?

Tagging people who don’t follow you is an important feature of Twitter. Though I do believe that it is currently possible for a large group of people to spam someones account until they could no longer use it. Also, because of how flexible the Twitter API is, it is not beyond imagination to expect someone to create a script in the future to automatically tag followers, something which, as I discussed, could be abused greatly.