First things first I would just like to say I have spoken to Jon on numerous occasions and I do give him praise for his commitment to bringing out new and interesting applications for the web, however his latest product called Twollow hits a new low for Twitter tools (and again this whole post is dedicated to constructive feedback rather then negative).
Personally for me back in the day when I was used Twitter on a regular basis, I used to get continually annoyed to see many people I would follow auto following me back, I only assumed this because their response was absolutely instant.This impersonal approach made me believe that many Twitterers even when I started using back in April 2007 were using the broadcast to everyone approach and not uniquely communicating on a one to one basis.
The idea of Twollow personifies in my opinion this annoyance, with one added bonus the ability to autofollow people mentioning certain keywords! Well, here is the next gen of incorrect usage of Twitter, the amount of people shown in the below video that Jon has been followed by are just people simply following him because he followed them, it’s a vicious cycle of events that needs to be stopped:
Quick Twollow.com Demo from jon on Vimeo.
There needs to be fluid conversation running through the Twitter network, I mean if people really are into collecting as many Twitter followers as possible this may be the tool for them particulary if they use Twitter search to find out the most talked about term and then autofollow people based on that! However, that could in turn lead to a very one sided look to someone’s Twitter feed with more people being followed then are following you!
Now if this idea was put into retrospect and the idea of autofollowing was removed then this service could give people a transparent view on the Twittersphere, but that would lead to huge risk of simply being a Twitter Search.
The main thing I would like to see for this service is for the auto follow to be removed and maybe this service to be bought into a more realtime layout, perhaps looking at a Real-Time Friendfeed updating system. This way people can make much more educated guesses about who they want to follow, maybe who will they will respond to and keep more up to date far quicker.
Image Source: Twollow.com
