DISQUS

richrecruiter · 4 months ago

When I catch someone auto-retweeting, they will be unfollowed. That's spam.

Cindy McAsey · 4 months ago

I've been doing the same think Rich and I'm starting to like my friends list again. There's not near as many junk tweets.

Miguel · 4 months ago

I will do the same

Zoli Erdos · 4 months ago

YoSpam :-(

@ScottBradley · 4 months ago

I agree

ArticlesFYI · 4 months ago

Yep absolutely .. a few sincere a ton opportunistic

People Search · 4 months ago

Is Twitter becoming a bastion of redundant retweets? This certainly won't help that any.

Cory · 4 months ago

If Twitter continues to be an automated network, who will be left to follow the links?

The "set it and forget it" philosophy is really going to hurt its credibility as a social network.

Michael A. Stelzner · 4 months ago

This sounds promising--the auto retweet.

What would make it REALLY awesome if it queued up "suggested retweets" and emailed you the updates. Then you simply email back "Yes" and it retweets for you.

Or some combination of TweetLater and queue. I think people following niches would find this powerful.

Phyllis · 4 months ago

Now that makes sense. Then I could look at the tweets and make a human decision, otherwise forget it. People trust that I have at least checked out the link before I pass it long.

Glory Gray · 4 months ago

Suggested retweets based on keywords could be timesaving and helpful--as long as I'm able to 'hit the button' before it's sent out. Similar to the "Vet followers" button on TweetLater.

As long as RT's still only comprised 20%-30% of my tweeting, I'm okay with that. Any more and I'd start annoying myself!

unmarketing · 4 months ago

I like the idea of suggested retweets as well. It's a slippery slope when you automate anything in Twitter

Kat · 4 months ago

How lame. Some apps are really helpful, but when we eliminate the social part of social networking, why bother? At least it will be semi easy for us to spot these auto retweets. .. so we can unfollow or block them.

Heidi Miller · 4 months ago

Yeah, Ben, I'm going to go with "no" on this one. I have resisted doing auto DMs to new followers and auto follow programs. Maybe it's just the community manager in me talking, but I still think that social media should be... social. Personal. I want to read an article and add a personal comment/opinion when I retweet it, not just have some bot do it for me.

What can I say? I'm a hands-on kind of girl.

Phyllis · 4 months ago

I agree with your comment about this app, but I have a different take on auto DM. I view it as my "answering machine message." I am very busy with so much work, and I don't feel I should make people wait for an acknowledgement that they are following me - thus the auto DM. I know this is still a controversial.

nuphero · 4 months ago

No doubt that I'll unfollow who use these kind of tools.

drewolanoff · 4 months ago

"boost your twitter personality" ? What the....seriously? This is sad.

BradleyWill · 4 months ago

RTing is the new measure of influence. RTing someone is like re quoting someone in front of our whole network. It is a humbling thing, actually one of the great respects you can show someone on Twitter. This "brilliant tool" will exploit it and devalue the meaning of a RT. It should be banned and I also will block anyone using it.

StartupBooster · 4 months ago

I agree with most of you - this really is a long term pain for a short term gain. People follow you because you share quality content - not because you are good at being the middle man to forward other people's content to them. They can simply follow others if that is the case. Auto Tweeting I believe will diminish the value of the microblogging (Twitter).

Jared O'Toole · 4 months ago

I don't think its the right direction but inevitable. Twitter is becoming more spammy yet is still fun and useful.

Something like this could be used for good. But again some will have useful streams while others will stream pointless stuff and use it for spam. Never ending circle.

Virtual Miss Friday · 4 months ago

Yotwit seems to be a good tool for twitter. However I still prefer re-tweeting articles myself. I get to choose articles that will not only be of interest to me and my followers, but also articles that have real substance too.

Tyler Davis · 4 months ago

Automated retweeting is definitely not the right direction that Twitter needs to go. Twitter is all about user interaction and sharing. This will just diminish that if it is automated. I agree with YoSpam and that people will just stop following these users that decide to use this option.

Cindy McAsey · 4 months ago

Yes it may free you to do other things, but the cost is trust. It's just not worth it in my book.

Bryan Coe · 4 months ago

I think automation is a good thing, but maybe not in the sense of retweeting other people. I use it to spread out my tweets. I usually spend time each day reading articles/posts relevant to my companies industry, so instead of posting a bunch of tweets in a short time (I hate when my Twitter stream is filled by one person that just did 10 tweets in a row) I'll automate them to spread them out over the day. With that said, if you are posting stuff that you didn't read. That sounds very spammy to me.

xposure · 4 months ago

I agree with the comments regarding trust in regards to tweets, re tweets and recommendations. It would be useful if the service allowed you to approve or disapprove the tweets before they went out. This I think would be a half way house solution.

Charity · 4 months ago

I never RT anything I haven't read first. I think that's the best policy. :o)

Harvey Ramer · 4 months ago

I agree, the set it and forget it RT idea isn't quite as spammy as outsourcing tweet content to an automated service, but I could never feel right about doing it. I've had an uneasy relationship with automation in general. It is sometimes difficult to determine where to draw the line.

I only use automation to syndicate original content.

Mark · 4 months ago

Either people will tire of the canned content and stop following them or they will tire of it and stop using Twitter.

Harvey Ramer · 4 months ago

While I'm all for automated tools that allow bloggers to syndicate content (intentionally chosen links and blog posts for example) across social network sites, delegating the selection of content to a service risks making Twitter into a meaningless SPAM machine. Automated content posting services should be banned. Automated RT services though, could be a better thing because we select and RT based on interest and the reputation of the blogger.

Lars Hilse · 4 months ago

It's not like it's "the wheel" or something. If I'm not mistaking similar products have been around for ages (e. g. Twitterfeed, etc.) Or did I miss something?

ChasUnderwoodIII · 4 months ago

I agree with everyone so far. I post links from my blog at http://StuffRichPeopleLove.com to twitter and keep my followers up to date on developments at my site, random thoughts and things I find interesting. Broadcasting some web bots interpretation of my thoughts will lead to diminished interest. It will likely lead to the death of Twitter but the emergence of yet another social networking tool.

fromvikingstock · 4 months ago

I knew this would be coming soon: a quick fix for a low "Generosity" score on www.Twitalyzer.com -- certainly not a good thing. It further weakens the validity of retweeting as a measure of generosity, and places retweeting into the growing catagory of well intended tools that can be abused. Generosity on Twitter is a concept that needs to be studied more closely and explicated more fully, especially now that YoTwits has automated its only metric.

TwtrCoach · 4 months ago

Hi Ben.

Guess it was a semi automated retweet. Since you had the option to select keyword(s) for which kind of tweets you want retweeted. Dough I can see that this can potentially lead the users that get the retweets to focus tweets around popular retweet keywords.

I also noticed that they used their Twitter profile @YoTwits within the tweet that was sent out from their service. Twitterfeed don't do that. With Twitterfeed you can see on status line that Tweet was sent via Twitterfeed.

And YoTwits has not the option where you have to log in to your Twitter account to allow them to send Tweets from your Twitter profile. I tried it out. Had a bad experience with a feed service before where I did not authorize them posting feeds to my Twitter profile. Started to get a lot of automated promotional feeds that I had not requested. Not that I any reason to believe YoTwits will do so.

But I expect the people behind YoTwits to get in touch with Twitter so they get it the program authorized so we as Twitter users have some idea that this is a safe program to use.

I noticed on the feed that they sent out a #hashtag for the blog/username I selected to feed. So as see it at the moment it is @YoTwits that will receive the most credits from these Tweets not the original sender.

Cheers..

tFeeder · 4 months ago

Although we base tFeeder (http://tfeeder.com/, which now includes a mobile version) completely upon retweets as a measure of how interesting a story is, it seems like the more popular Twitter gets and the more lazy Twitter users become, the lower the weight each retweet will have (similar to Google concept of a backlink weight). And by now, I think we all agree Twitter is not ready to handle spam retweets (it should worry about security first..).

Grandma Mary · 4 months ago

How can it possibly work with thousands retweeting one tweet and then retweeting all the retweets. Twitter will be brought down.

dnusko · 4 months ago

Information pollution! Already in 1976 I read in WSJ: Clear your mind of useless information.

Dieter Nusko · 4 months ago

Information pollution! Already in 1976 I read in WSJ: Clear your mind of useless information.

Leonid S. Knyshov · 4 months ago

I wish them luck, but I suspect the product mix will change. I unfollow accounts that post useless junk to their streams. Those preset feeds are definitely junk.

I am working on an application that will hopefully make Twitter more useful through a little bit of automation.

Haven't released the app because I am still thinking how to implement oAuth in that thing. Using a user's username/password at this stage is a sign of laziness from my perspective, so I refuse to go that route.

jstratford · 4 months ago

It's an interesting toolbox which isn't for me though it would give definite variety and the RT function is novel, but I definitely wouldn't recommend it! One of the important things about social networking and social media beyond relationships is some of what we do in the area of engagement. We seek to relate with others and if it's all automated then there is no one checking out a website and determining if it's even worth an RT. :( That's dangerous since it'd change the dynamic. We need to have a degree of transparency and authenticity instead of a black veil. Let's be real and personal and when using screens take the time to screen them. I personally do use feeds to supplement, but take the time to read every post or article ahead of time and kill the ones in the ques that aren't in line with what is in my profile.

RT 's are great, but only if there's a valid reason and if people are recognized for retweeting and at the least wished a good day.

That's my two cents worth and I thank you for another great information post Ben and most likely I stirred up the pot just a little, but that's all good! ;)

Erwin · 4 months ago

Anyone caught using this should be banned from Twitter. The main reason Twitter is so powerful is that the shared links are shared for a reason. Someone thought they hold real value. If you ruin that by spamming like this, your reputation will suffer for it..

Carmen_Krushas · 4 months ago

What a folly to social media. Yes, I am a believer of apps making life easier, but we seem to continue distancing ourselves from our core...which is to read and understand a story before sharing with others with your stamp of approval or vocal dissent. So, no. I do not like YoTweet.

Carmen_Krushas · 4 months ago

What a folly to social media. Yes, I am a believer of apps making life easier, but we seem to continue distancing ourselves from our core...which is to read and understand a story before sharing with others with your stamp of approval or vocal dissent. So, no. I do not like YoTweet.