Reality Me

Qwitter and Twitterless are two new services which alert you when followers quit.

Do you use Twitter? Or do you still wonder why people Twitter? I use Twitter to follow the pulse for things that interest me, in particular, I follow:

1. friends and family
2. people in Knoxville
3. some breaking news sources
4. the movers and shakers in the technology world
5. ColdFusion and PHP developers (yeah yeah…some of you .NET guys too)

You should be using Twitter to be in the global conversation. Twitter serves everyone differently depending on how you use the service which may be one or more of the following:

1. Exhibitionists, Voyeurs, Gossips – These are the folks that will send/read a stream of messages about the minutia of daily life
2. News feeds – These are the folks alerting the world about their experiences with the California fires, or the next big event. These are the newspapers getting the headlines out. These are people like myself alerting others that the Interstate is at a stand still.
3. Topic Specific – These would be people sharing information about a particular subject. Unlike news feeds these will often include back and forth discussions about the topic.
4. Spammers – People taking advantage of the tendency to follow those who follow you simply to draw attention to a product or website. The Twitter staff and others are trying to minimize the ability for people to spam through Twitter.
5. Utility – such as how The RedCross has used Twitter to make accessing the Safe and Well database easier.

Twitter is quick to alert you when you have new followers. If someone decides they want to see your messages, you get an email giving you the opportunity to follow them back. However, when someone decides that you send too many messages, your messages are not interesting, or they are tired of hearing that you had a tuna fish sandwich for lunch again, they quit following you and you never know. Perhaps you notice your numbers have changed and all you can do is wonder if you offended someone. Until now! Two services now tell you when someone quits following your Twitter stream. Qwitter will send you an email whenever someone quits following and simply needs your Twitter username and email address. Twitterless is in beta and requires an invite code. By entering your Twitter username and password, Twitterless will notify you when followers quit. Get an invite code by following @tless. Twitterless has a blog and is developed by Mark Nutter who you can follow on Twitter @marknutter.

Be sure to follow my ramblings on Twitter @djuggler. My Tweets are very stream of consciousness and vary from Knoxville traffic/gas reports, to family happenings, to interesting sightings, some audio or pictorial commentary linked from Utterli in a Tweet, to politics, to tech, and just plain nonsensical babble.

See also: Put @RedCross in your Twitter and Did Chris Brogan just steal my PULSE?!

Update 9Aug2009: @followermonitor has joined the ranks of @tless and Qwitter. Twitterless is working great for me. I have not had a message from Qwitter since like December.

Update 24-Nov-2010: A list of seven such services.