My Friend Mr Tweet, and my new-found Friends on Twitter

Twitter is pretty boring until you start to follow people. And it’s also pretty boring if the people you follow don’t update more than one a week, don’t follow you back, or only tweet about themselves. So how do you find interesting people to follow on Twitter?

Enter Mr Tweet, a new service from @mingyeow and @ambivalence. Mr. Tweet looks through your extended network on twitter to help you build relationships on Twitter, and answers two very simple, and very important questions: —

* Which are the followers I should be following in return?
* Who are the influential people I should be following?

How it works is incredibly simple. You follow @mrtweet on Twitter. And that’s it. Mr Tweet will then send you a direct tweet pointing you to your personal report at the Mr Tweet web site. When I followed Mr Tweet, my report came through in about 6 hours – but due to rising popularity (Robert Scoble found it), you may have to wait up to 48 hours, especially if you have a lot of followers and / or follow a lot of people – but it’s well worth waiting for.

The report you receive (see my example report for @clarocada here) is produced online at Mr Tweet’s site, and allows you to either find influencers beyond your network or show which of your followers you should be following back.

The beauty of Mr Tweet’s reports is that you can assess whether to follow twitter users suggested to you on the basis of a great deal of information: –

• Examples of who, among those you follow, follows them.
• See how many of the people that you follow, follow them.
• How many followers they have.
• How many people they follow.
• A quick ‘following/followers’ ratio.
• A reciprocity statement – such as ‘frequently replies to non-follows’, ‘usually follows back’.
• How often they update – you may want to limit the number of ’57 tweets a day’ people you follow!
• Link to their web site or blog as noted on their twitter profile.
• Brief biography from their twitter profile.
• View their last 5 tweets (A really useful touch).

The Mr Tweet Blog has just had its first entry, and they encourage feedback at Get Satisfaction. All in all, Mr Tweet is an extremely useful, very well-designed and beautifully easy to access service.

Follow @mrtweet and see who you’re missing…