So there is a huge buzz going about at the moment regarding http://www.tweepme.com – and the premise is basically this:

You sign up on the page, using your twitter username and password. Your account auto follows every other TweepMe user over a period of time, as does theirs meaning that everyone ends up following everyone.

So basically, I only really see it being useful for people that actually care about the follow count and want to increase it, or people that want to try and spam out their stuff to a larger audience. Whilst I can understand and appreciate the latter, is blindly adding several thousand people to your timeline / updates really the best way to do that?

To get it kick started, they are offering “free lifetime memberships to the first 5,000 Tweeple who register.” so straight away you know this is going to turn into a paid for service later, which will bring its own problems.

For a start you’re going to have 5,000+ followers, think about how hectic your timeline gets now and how hard it can be to keep up and see what you want from certain people, that’s only going to get worse with huge numbers of followers.  Most of those people who are following you will be people who care about high follow count, which often goes hand in hand with high post count, lets say 30 per day (which isn’t overly generous) and you’re already at 150,000 tweets a day from people you don’t know and potentially share no interests with.  The people who are not there for a high user count are ones that want to reach a large audience, so you can be sure of a tweet or two a day from them about their services or site or whatever.  And that’s just public feed…

If you are following them and likewise they are following you, be ready for the incoming spam DM.  How long do you think it will take for spammers to realise they can *AUTOMATICALLY* get 5,000+ followers and be able to spam them?  Not long at all, you can be sure of that!

Whilst I realise you can un-follow anyone who annoys you, or even the bulk of the auto adds, how quickly do you think you can go through and manually un-follow all the people it added and avoid those you want to keep / already had? The service doesn’t even offer the ability to auto delete them, instead making it out like a good thing that you keep the followers if you leave – “If at ANY point a member no longer wishes to participate, they can end their subscription and KEEP their followers!” – Yet no mention of the ability to remove entirely, and have the service un-follow all those that it followed.

And while I’m on about what isn’t mentioned on the site, how about these for glaring omissions:

  • Privacy policy
  • Spam policy
  • Abuse policy
  • Terms and conditions

You’re expected to put your twitter username and password in a site with none of these available, no mention of what else is done with your username and password etc.  Certainly not for me.

Twitter is becoming bigger and bigger every day, and with all the current media attention that’s only going to escalate at a rate of knots, which means an influx of the ‘myspace users’ type of account.  This is exactly the service they will gravitate towards, and therefore be followed by your account.

Personally I like to keep my timeline relatively clean, it consists of tweeple that I have a shared interest with, that tweet about things I like or perhaps even just share geography with.  Whatever the reason, every person I’m following I’ve chosen to have in my feed because I’m interested in the things they have to say, and I would assume the same for those that follow me.

If this service was as opt-in as it claims to be, then it would simply send you a mail with the details of say 20 tweepme users a day, and you could select if you wanted to follow them or not, instead of just automatically adding them all, that would make it a much better service in my opinion.

If you want a good way to find people that are interested in the same things as you, then I would suggest you try the TweeterTags service I mentioned in my Top Ten Tools to Twitter post.  There you can search for people that have tagged themselves as being interested in a certain topic, and if you tag yourself with all of the things that interest you then you will find that your follow count increases as others find you in the tags and follow you from there.

Likewise, if you want to find people who are geographically close to you (and can even sub filter by keyword) then take a look at NearbyTweets and take a look through those people who live nearby and see what they are tweeting about.

I find it interesting that the @tweepme account has been suspended, no doubt for triggering some limit on number of follows per day / per hour / whatever.  I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this happened to some of the users of the service as well.  Remember, its your username and password being used, you give them authority to do whatever they wish with your account, and that includes adding so many people in such a short time as to get your account canned.

All comments and suggestions welcome in the comments below…

~Shepy