TweetSourcer Find the Right Twitter Crowd
Twitter is the current buzz app of choice. Everyone from Oprah to Bill Gates is using it, but with those thousands upon millions of users comes a problem: how do you find people who’re looking for the same thing you are?
TweetSourcer hopes to solve that problem by using a unique search tool that finds people of like mind and auto-follows them for you so you don’t have to manually find them individually and link up. Since many Twitter users look at and follow back those who follow them, this usually works out.
The service is free and easy to use, but I have a couple of caveats about it. One of those may have a fix in the works.
The biggest concern I have is the pure automation of TweetSourcer. You don’t have a choice as to whether you want to follow the entire crowd it finds from your search: it just happens. There’s also no “undo” feature to negate the follows TweetSourcer has made for you. A fix for this is in discussion, but doesn’t appear to be coming soon, so that’s a big caveat to remember before using this tool.
The other concern is with the Twitter terms of service and how TweetSourcer works. While the app isn’t a direct violation of Twitter’s TOS, it might become one. Twitter is notoriously unreliable in their implementation of TOS changes. Some have found their accounts suddenly locked down from following because they had “too much activity” or with no explaination at all.
An extra note on using TweetSourcer: you’d better be using a Twitter app of some kind, like TweetDeck or Seesmic, or you’re going to get inundated once you’ve allowed TweetSourcer to follow people for you. Going from 10 people followed to 5,000 is a pretty big leap and makes for a pretty flooded Twitterbox. Fair warning.
For those who use Twitter as a glorified RSS feeder or to blast business-related information, this tool is probably exactly what you need to build a useful list very quickly. TweetSourcer does close accounts for spammers, so if you’re in it for that, you’ll have to find another way. Otherwise, it could be an extremely useful app for a certain demographic of Twtitter users.
I bet Ashton Kutcher wishes this has been around for his thing.
