Here’s something I don’t do very often.. a review.
I’ve been sparked into action by a twitter automation tool, Hummingbird2. Before I begin, I’d just like to point out that I’m not an affiliate and any links are straight, not coded.. so I speak my opinion..
I needed a tool to help find interesting folk on the Big T, so I went shopping and based on what it said on the tin, came back with HB2. Silly me.
The problem is that it bills itself as being a highly accurate finder / adder / unsubscriber based on targeted keywords in the public stream.
It’s true – you find people by telling it what you’re interested in. It finds anyone who happens to have typed or retweeted your word and compares them against a few heuristics to see if they’re up to scratch (simple scoring mechanism based on your settings for min tweets, followers etc).
The problem is that the search engine seems to be dated circa 1995. There’s no support for operators, negatives or even a simple AND. For those who understand such things, you’re basically getting:
SELECT * FROM firehose WHERE msg like ‘%keyword%’
I don’t get it. Even the public API for Twitter supports most of their fancy switches and query language.
So the net result is doing anything clever, like filtering out messages from foreign languages, restricting to a very specific subject, time, place etc is impossible.
I ran it for a few hours and have spent a few days trying to clean up the mess it made of my account. In spite of setting the quality requirement to B+, I ended up following spammers, poker people and *endless* “retweet to win” types.
Another gripe is the unintelligent unfollow system. There’s no VIP list or way of protecting the innocent, there’s no flair to how the unfollowed are chosen. There’s also no way to manually unfollow users in case it picks up someone you’re not interested in. The big song and dance about clever unfollowing is simply “unfollows the oldest person who hasn’t followed you back”.
The makers seem to have spent a lot of time on a nice polished interface, a half baked Twitter client (presumably to give some kind of “free download” and forgotten the most basic things – if I want to employ a software tool to help me follow interesting / targeted people, then it better be able to target.
I did write to the company about my concerns, but I received a very odd email back being all philosophical about success (“Like any tool if you are looking for the tool to make your success you will find that your success is limited.” Er, yes. Now – why doesn’t it filter like it says it does?)
Summary – if you want something to sit there and follow zillions of people in the hope that they follow you back, it’s probably quite good. If you want to find targeted users matching specific criteria – I found it useless.
