As you may know, I’m a huge fan of Twimailer, which is service that sends you a notification via e-mail when you have a new follower.
Twimailer provides you with information about the new follower such as how many people they follow, how many followers they have, their location, Web site, bio, and their last five updates on Twitter. It’s an effective and quick way to assess whether a new follower is worth following back – and a major upgrade from the e-mail notification provided by Twitter.
Given how Twitter has shown little inclination to upgrade its notification service, it is not surprising that a growing number of companies such as Twimailer see it as an opportunity.
A newcomer on the scene is friendFilter, which offers things such as the number of people that you and the new follower both follow, messages they send to people you know, the average number of hours between posts, their follower-to-friend ratio and Twitter ranking.
As well, it provides photos of people you both follow. If you click on one of the photos, you can see that person’s last 20 updates.
friendFilter’s interface is not has friendly as Twimailer’s but its value lies in the different kind of information that it provides. While there is some overlap between Twimailer and friendFilter, it’s easy to see how both of them could be used to really get a handle on a new follower.
friendFilter:
Twimailer:
Technorati Tags: friendFilter, twimailer, twitter
6 Comments
Which mailer do you prefer? They both look interesting.
Thanks,
Nate
They're both solid but I prefer Twimailer.
Topify (http://www.topifybeta.com/) is another entry in this field and looks like an even match for Twimailer, though I haven't checked that one out. I may try FriendFilter instead, though, because of the amount of checking it does for relevance and network overlap.
I think it would be wise to update this article to emphasize FriendFilter may be in beta, but the accompanying TwittFilter is very much alpha. The link you have goes to the signup page, which gives no indication of this status, but the resulting place to login is a largely broken page with links that aren't functional and "alpha" all over it. It isn't very clear what is expected when logging in, and I got a number of conflicting status/error messages when it tried to create my file. Still not sure if it worked or how to confirm, which has me a bit concerned.
Yes, Twittfilter is alpha, but "as far as I know" everything is working well enough. But like anything, I KNOW there will be issues. Friendfilter can work by itself as an email service, so that is why we separated the two names. We have around 500 new users in the last 36 hours, and so far, most sign in issues were resolved by clicking 'sign out' (which clears cache) on twittfilter or in rare occasions clearing cache on IE7 manually. If you are still having issues, please let me know. That is the only way I can fix 'em.
Christopher
Thanks for the info, Mark. Have you heard of a filter that allows you to receive select updates from your followers (other than on mobile)? It seems that protocol is that you follow anyone who follows you. But if I did that I'd never be able to look at useful posts from people I want updates from because a rush of non-useful ones would come through at a million miles an hour. I recently posted an article about 3 things Twitter could do to improve my experience – http://tiny.cc/kqYCp – are any of these things in the works?