I discovered www.tweetlater.com last night, luckily just in time. As a result of some other tweet activity I was being swamped with new followers and it was cumbersome going through emails to see who was following, then going to the profile and deciding whether to follow or not.

It is made worse because I’m also running two other twitter accounts, one for me and another for a client. tweetlater will monitor my new followers and then email me at intervals to prompt me and then let me go through a single page that show all the new ones, for all the Twitter accounts I manage- letting me accept, ignore or block. Sweet and easy.

In addition tweetlater lets me schedule tweets in advance. Yeah Twitter is good for spur of the moment posts, but I think that sending out 3 tweets one after another dilutes the impact. So maybe I send one out, and queue the other two, let them sit and go out in their own time and get back to work without having to worry about tweeting later.

tweetlater has other good stuff that I will check out later, both free and paid service available.

I found this site yesterday ifollowback.com/ that helps to increase the number of Twitter followers. The idea seems good - since I’m now trying to see what Twitter really can do, both for me and for a client. Sign up with them and you start getting followers. Great idea. But for me, at this point in my Twitter life - it’s truned out to be too much, too fast.

Within an hour I started getting followers, I was spending a lot of time going through my email and checking each follower profile to see if I should add them. Most had, in my opinion, no match to my profile, but the terms of service require that I follow 90% of them. This seems totally overwhelming - I would be faced with a mass of clutter on my in box that would interfere with seeing the people I really want to follow. This reminds me of SEO a few years ago, when the idea was to cram web sites being promoted into pile of spam directories and also of reciprocal linking of sites.

Perhaps I’m too new to Twitter, but this reciprocal follow exchange seems wrong - so within a couple of hours I’d opted out.

As of this morning I had at least 50 new followers within less than 12 hours. So if that is what you want, maybe this service is good for you.

I’ve been using Twitter for months and have no idea what its good for, all I do know is that from my occasional random tweets there are a significant number of followers and I still have no idea why. However, I need to get a better grasp and I’m now helping to manage a Twitter account for someone else.

The first change is to choose a new front end interface. I have been using Twhirl - mostly because it also handled updates to Pownce - but Pownce is now dead/dormant.

For the moment I’m going with TweetDeck - it has a big footprint, you either have to be able to deal with overlapping windows or, like me, have a second monitor that it can sit on. Right now it takes the full width and 75% of the height, if I have IM up also, IM gets hidden. So far I kind of like it, but it is not ideal. It has a way of grouping those you are following, but the grouping requires tagging all the ones that are to be in the group - these probably being the ones you mainly want to follow. What I really need is a way to remove certain busy twitterers from the main list, and put them in a second group - the ones that are twittering a bit too much and hiding the ones I really want to follow.

Follow me at http://twitter.com/MacLeanDesign

A week ago I, on impulse, purchased PC Pitstop’s Optimize2 (one year subscription). I know my drive is sluggish with lots of old unused files. So, yes it works, cleans up files and does some internet tweaking. The file clean seemed ok, the internet tweaking may have given trivial increase, I think I might be getting 3600 instead of 3500.

However a week later, while doing some program debugging it was suggested I get a free copy of CCleaner. (Ok, I admit I forgot about it and had posted an entry here a long time ago) Running it was a major surprise, it deleted a lot of files, for example installation and log files going back 3 years. It has somewhat aggressive default settings - it ended up deleting some cookies that lost my automatic logins on some sites - so I had to log in again. Next time I changed the defaults.

Running Optimize after CCleaner does not find any additional files to delete. Of course it is possible that the first time I ran Optimize it found and fixed things that CCleaner would not have fixed, but at this point, I think I wasted my money.

Optimize does do one thing - it does registry cleanup - but it does not seem to be significant enough to pay for that feature