A few weeks ago, I alluded to a new Twitter application that would eventually debut to help qualify the people who follow you on Twitter.
Good friend and developer extraordinaire Christopher Peri and I proudly introduce FriendFilter in Beta. I’ve collaborated with Peri in the past to develop @microPR (along with Stowe Boyd), MicroJobs, and other apps soon to be released. His vision and technical prowess are ahead of many and I’m lucky to know him.
FriendFilter improves the signal to noise ratio on Twitter by providing you with the intelligence necessary to effectively curate the content and the people that appear in your Twitter timeline.
Auto-following dilutes the content and flow of the conversations that inspire and guide you.
While there are many tools that facilitate the proactive discovery of individuals who share similar interests and passions such as Mr. Tweet, TweepSearch, Twellow, Twubble, and WhoShouldIFollow, none provide a matchmaking system at the point of follow. This is an important distinction as Twitter sends an auto-notifier every time someone follows you with nothing more than a link to the person’s page in the micro community.
Without meaningful guidance, you’re following people back as a generous act of reciprocity, which generates goodwill, but not necessarily because you believe their content or updates in the statusphere are relevant and worth following. It is this goodwill that is forcing many power users to create a secondary account simply to follow the voices whom they must follow to stay current and motivated.
FriendFilter complements your notification message from twitter via email with detailed information about each person following you so that you can make an informed decision on the spot as to whether or not to follow back.
The stats and data provided by FriendFilter include:
– Number of friends
– Number followers
– Average posts per day
– Friends we both follow
– Messages to tweets I know
– Average number of hours between posts
– Followers to Friends ratio
– Ranking (in Thousands)
– Average Follower growth
– Friends who follow both of you
If someone seems interesting, you can simply click on their user name to see their last 20 updates, a TweetCloud, as well as a direct link to friend that person.
You control the volume of emails you receive from FriendFilter by adjusting the threshold of inbound alerts. For example, I have set my minimum score to “3” which qualifies followers based on a cumulative score that represents how close we align within the Twitterverse.
FriendFilter also provides you with an email update each time your username is mentioned on Twitter, which is helpful for personal and professional brand managers for up-to-the-minute online reputation management (ORM).
Of course there’s more to FriendFilter, but we’ll save those gems for later. Remember it’s a early Beta, so please be kind and let @pervision know if you have any issues or ideas.
In the meantime, please sign up for FriendFilter to increase the signal to noise ratio on Twitter and invest in a more meaningful and rewarding social graph.
Happy 3rd Birthday Twitter!
Helpful Posts on PR 2.0:
– Twitter and Social Networks Introduce a New Era of Social CRM (sCRM)
– The Human Network = The Social Economy
– In the Statusphere, ADD Creates Opportunities for Collaboration and Education
– Humanizing Social Networks, Revealing the People Powering Social Media
– Are Blogs Losing Authority to the Statusphere?
– Social Networks Now More Popular than Email; Facebook Surpasses MySpace
– I Like You, Micro Acts of Appreciation Reverberate Across the Social Graph
– BackType Connects the Conversation Graph
– Tracking Brands on Twitter to Improve How You Listen and Engage
– The Ties that Bind Us – Visualizing Relationships on Twitter and Social Networks
– Make Tweet Love – Top Tips for Building Twitter Relationships
– The Battle for Your Social Status
– Twitter Tools for Communication and Community Professionals
– Is Twitter a Viable Conversation Platform
– Is FriendFeed the Next Conversation Platform
– The Social Revolution is Our Industrial Revolution
– The State of Social Media
– Free ebook: The Essential Guide to Social Media
Connect with me on:
Twitter, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Plaxo, Plurk, Identi.ca, BackType, Social Median, or Facebook
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This is an interesting experiment and a step forward on Twitter applications.
But it ignores the recent trend of newbies to randomly follow 2000 people, cut lose those who don’t Auto-Follow within 24 hours, reach the 2000 limit again, rinse and repeat. Sometimes this is done manually, other times through bots.
It’s how people can get 50,000 followers in a month (seriously!). To them, content doesn’t matter at all, it’s contact over content.
This has been going on in a huge way since late December/early January on the advice of some social media advisers who shall be nameless. I get followed a lot but find that 90% unfollow me if I don’t immediately Auto-Folllow.
In the short term, this strategy gets you a lot of followers in a short period of time but there is no common interests that create a community of following/ers.
It’s like the Nouveau Riche vs. the Old-Timers who carefully choose who they want to follow. If you don’t believe me, check out Twitterholic’s Top 200 and there are so many people on these two pages who didn’t even have Twitter accounts 2 or 3 months ago.
People LOVE their metrics so the high numbers are bound to impress but if no one is reading your content or you’re just a link ReTweeter, do you really have any influence at all? It’s a question I’ve talked about with Twitter Grader because it’s a whole new way of “using” that doesn’t seem to be helping the goal of social networking.
I’ll be trying out your system and I admire the work that goes into creating these imaginative applications. Good luck!
This is @perivision (Christopher) Please make sure you check the bottom of the page when you sign up. I have to text too low. Thats what happens when you add screenshots. 🙂
..and please, email me if you have any question.. perivision _ yahoo
Brian,
Love what you have started.
It is important to be able to quantify potential connection so you can best get the most out of twitter.
I might suggest it would be great if one could customize their ranking threshold as I can see different users having different tolerances and needs.
I look forward to watching this tool evolve.
Is it just me or does this not work properly in Firefox?
I can’t sign up using FF3, keeps saying that my email isn’t valid. Signing up using the exact same info does work in IE7.
After that, I can log in using IE, but can’t log in using FF. At the top it says I’m logged in but in the main frame, it says “Your login does not seem to be correct. Try again.”
Liz:
I agree about you “contact over content” comment, especially with new publishers.
Over the last 6 months I’ve perceived a large decrease in social media’s precious “conversations” and much more link promotion and one liners.
Also, check out http://www.TweetTop.com for some quality tweeps to follow.
Cheers.
J
I was about to sign up but realized there was still no OAuth integration with Twitter (wefollow already supports it for example).
Are you planning OAuth support ?
(btw, i’ve asked you on Twitter, so feel free to reply there @armandoalves)
keep getting message: Error Loading Page Can't sign up
Fixed…