It took awhile but my invitation for Mr. Tweet finally arrived a few days after I requested to join – reflecting the enormous interest in the newest tool that aims to help you find new people to follow on Twitter.
The excitement over Mr. Tweet is understandable. As much as Twitter is a wonderful communications tool, it has its shortcomings. Perhaps the biggest is how difficult it can be to build a base of people to follow. For many people, it can be a time-consuming process that involves a lot of experimenting, hunches and leaps of faith.
While Twitter has done nothing to solve this problem, there are a few players trying to tackle it, most notably Twellow, Just Tweet It and Twubble. While they are useful, none of them cracks the “follower” nut.
On the other hand, Mr. Tweet looks as though it’s on to something. The service works by looking through your Twitter network to determine people following you who you should follow, and the influential people within your Twitter network that you should follow.
Here are two screen shots of Mr. Tweet in action:
How Mr. Tweet determines who should follow is part of its secret sauce but what makes it appealing is the simple, clean interface. What I particularly like is the information displayed about each person it suggests. You can see how many people they follow, how many people follow them, how often they Tweet, what they do, where they are located and their Web site. More: You can also see some of their recent Tweets, which is cool.
It’s a great way to quickly determine whether the recommendation makes sense. If you want to follow, all you do is click on “Follow”, log in to Twitter, and you’re good to go.
All in all, Mr. Tweet is doing a lot of things really well, and there’s no reason why it shouldn’t become one of the de facto way to find followers on Twitter. Do not be surprised if it’s a service that Twitter eventually snaps up, much like it beefed up its search features by acquiring Summize.
Mr. Tweet does not appear to have a business model, although it talks about introducing premium features so clearly it’s working on the premise of building a large audience, and then rolling out tools to monetize it.
Mr. Tweet was created by Discovery.io, which describes itself as a “group of people who are highly passionate about engineering discovery systems and connecting people. We have deep technical and business expertise with regards to the problem we are solving”. The principles are Yu-Shan and Ming Yeow.
Technorati Tags: Mr. Tweet, twellow, twitter
2 Comments
I, too, like the promise of Mr. Tweet, but it has not yet added anything to the Twitosphere in terms of functionality. There are a number of other follow network tools and user rank metrics that are at least as beneficial, even if the presentation is not up to Mr. Tweet's level.
The strengths of the tool so far are the visual look and the common-sensical interpretation of user tendencies, of the things people use to evaluate whether or not to follow someone. However, my initial lists weren't at all useful.
On the one hand, I could look at a list of people I am not following in return. For whatever reasons, I have already done some assessment and determined not to follow them. Everyone has their algorithm for this and most get notifications to know when someone is following. At the moment, I'm not looking toward expansion, but when I do reviewing my own network is the first step. Maybe then that part of Mr. Tweet will have value. The second list is people I should be following, which in my initial update was purely the same regurgitated list of uber-users who already had a large following in other social networks and benefit from that here.
Both of these things are known commodities to most people who pay attention to their networks and have been using Twitter. The real benefit is probably for the newer users who may not have seen these names before, but even so many of the celebrity accounts aren't going to be able to engage a given person in the same way as users more on one's own level and context. I'm not willing to browse through pages to find those gems.
My expectation is that Mr. Tweet will improve its understanding of me and be able to allow the more relevant and useful information about other Twitter members to rise to the surface. There are scalability issues that are preventing rapid iteration of these lists, so I am anxious to see if my next update improves in this area.
The other major strength of Mr. Tweet is their outreach. They embraced GetSatisfaction quickly, seeking people out for input by direct message, posts and email. I think this is what gives them their biggest edge, long-term, over other follow net managers.
Kevin,
Thanks for the feedback. I think Mr. Tweet is off to a solid start, and I agree with your assessment that it will get better in times. I followed a few new people but, like you, many of the recommendations I had seen before.
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