Twitter Tracking

By | April 27, 2008

I’ve been using twitter for over a year now and am still only part sold on it. I keep having random people add me to their “following” list and I find this odd. Why would someone I don’t know want to follow my updates? I could make my updates private but I want to continue using the facebook twitter application to update my fb status from my tweets. It needs my updates to be public.

Thinking about the business model of twitter is an interesting exercise. Despite the large user base they don’t really seem to have one yet. The new Japanese version of twitter has adverts. Another idea might for them to sell user updates to businesses. Imagine tweeting about watching a movie and then being hit with netflix or blockbuster adverts.

Twitter is part way there and businesses are tracking you. You can set tracking on keywords that alerts your phone or IM when someone includes them in a tweet:

  • track word: starts tracking a word
  • untrack word: stops tracking a word
  • untrack all: stops tracking all words
  • track off: stops tracking all words
  • tracks or tracking: returns a list of words you’re tracking

So that is why random people keep adding me to their following list.

If that includes you then there’s a few other commands listed in the twitter support section you may want to play with.