Fine Print

Being a control freak on who I connect with (namely people I search out and manually click “follow” or “invite”), services such as Twollow are not my cup of tea. Snip from the developer’s blog: “Twollow lets you specify up to five different keywords which you can track and then automatically follow any Twitter user who uses those words.”

Someone followed me the other day; I visited their blog and saw a post about Twollow; so I tweeted them and asked if they “Twollowed” me; they said yes, and it was because they had used social media as a tracking term.

That’s cool, but if I had tweeted “… the mayor wanted to be more social, media were there to cover the event …” then would that “Twollower” (love all these new words!) have been disappointed in adding me, only to get no value and discard me, a fact only brought sadly home to me once I got my Qwitter alert.

I’m wary of using a service like this that might grow my Twitter network using quantity instead of quality.

~ John Carson, Senior Digital Media Specialist, GCI Canada (Twitter: johncarson)