More and more of my friends are using Twitter, and now Media Shift on PBS has an article on How 'Follower Spam' Infiltrated Twitter -- and How to Stop It. So, I thought I’d share a few of my tips for making better use of Twitter.

Adding material to Twitter

There are plenty of tools for accessing and adding content directly to Twitter. I have a Twitter Gadget for Windows Vista on one of my machines. I run Twirl. I run TwitterBox in Second Life all in addition to simply sending material directly from the Twitter Web page or to Twitter as an SMS message from my cellphone.

However, there are some other tools that I like to use as well. One is Twitterfeed. Twitterfeed will subscribe to the RSS feed of your blog, or other sites, such as BlogTalkRadio feeds, and submit them to Twitter under your username. I use this to send messages to Twitter when I add a blog post to Orient Lodge.

BrightKite works essentially the same as Twitter, but is focused on your location. It can feed Twitter. I use BrightKite sparingly. If I’m going to meetings or a conference in New York, I’ll use it, but I don’t use it for more mundane activities, like stopping at the gas station. Other sites also feed Twitter. I like to use Utterli.com to send audio messages from my cellphone. Unfortunately, Utterli sends indecipherable messages to Twitter and I think it has driven away a follower or two.

If I want to leave a voice message that people are more likely to receive, I like to use TwitterFone. TwitterFone uses voice recognition to take an audio message and leave it as a text message on Twitter. The voice recognition can be hit or miss, but then again, my typing on my cellphone is also often hit or miss.

Two other tools that I like are ping.fm and hellotxt. Both of these sites, as well as some others allow you to send one message that then gets sent to many of your microblogging at status update sites.

Reading and sharing information on Twitter

At the other end of the spectrum is FriendFeed. Friendfeed pulls together all of the material you publish online. If you are using both ping.fm and FriendFeed, your FriendFeed can get overloaded with duplicates, so be careful about how you arrange things.

One thing that I really like about FriendFeed is the rooms. You can set up a room to show all the activity of a group of people. Currently, I’m following 835 people on Twitter and it can be hard to keep track of all the different discussions. So, I group people into rooms. I’m in a couple rooms for that contain my political friends on Twitter. Other rooms are dedicated specific online communities, like the EntreCard Room.

Another tool that I use a lot, for various reasons, is TwitterLocal. It allows you to find recent Tweets from people around a specific zipcode.

Sometimes, I like to look at Tweet 2 Tweet. I stumbled across them quite accidentally one day. What they do is allow you to put two Twitter names in and see any discussion back and forth between these users.

On last organizing tool that I recently heard about is My Social Chatter. It displays Twitter on one side and FriendFeed on the other side and updates every two minutes.

Dealing with Followers

Currently, I’m following 839 people on Twitter and have 1,408 followers. Obviously, I’m not following everyone that follows me. I do get emails when people start following me, but when my email box gets really full, I don’t always see or follow up on those emails. With LessFriends, you can go out and see who is following you, whom you are following, and when you and someone else are mutually following each other. They do note that it can take a long time, especially if you have lots of followers or are following a lot of people.

I grabbed the report and threw it into Excel and it seemed to miss a lot of people. It only returned 859 different people, and I have more followers than that. However, I was surprised at the number of people that I’m following that are not following me back. Some are national organizations which I can understand that they don’t follow me back. Others are friends that use Twitter only to highlight their blog entries. Some, on the other hand, are friends that I would have thought would follow me. Perhaps they aren’t following me for the same reason I’m not following others, simply because we didn’t get the email, or the email got buried.

When I started checking people that are listed as following me that I am not following, I’m finding that it is inaccurate, and I’m actually following them.

When I discovered this, I decided not to take the report all that seriously, and, for example, unfollow people that it lists as me following, but not following me.

It does seem, however, that other people are using this strategy. Recently, I found another interesting site, Qwitter. If you sign up, it will send you a message whenever it finds someone that has stopped following you on Twitter. Each morning when I sit down to my email, I find many new people following me and many old people qwitting following me. In many cases these are sites about making quick money online, and I don’t follow them when they follow me, and I don’t mind when they stop following me. However, at times, I find people that I care about stopping following me. It makes me sad, but so far, I haven’t contacted people to ask why.

There is a lot you can do with Twitter and related sites. You can simply keep friends informed about the moment to moment events in your life. You can publicize your other content, and you can join in fascinating discussions. To do this, there are a lot of sites worth investigating. If you know of some other good sites, please tell me.