I now use TweetAdder exclusively (affiliate link).

This is professional software that costs money (currently starts at $55)  but you can try the demo first. If runs on your local machine (Mac, PC or Linux).

Why would I pay for professional twitter automation software like TweetAdder, especially if I had tools that did it for free? Because it saves me time and money. The TweetAdder developers maintain it whenever Twitter makes a change. That means my down time is the shortest possible. One of my key old scripts stopped working for 4 weeks until I had a chance to debug it. That doesn’t happen with professional software.

Many of the features of TweetAdder don’t get used. I didn’t use some of the advanced search functionality. But when I had a brainwave to target Romanian speakers, for example, then I can quickly put a campaign together. In the past I’d need to customize an existing script.

Anyone who has a professional or serious need for twitter can justify TweetAdder at about $1 a week over 12 months.

My main twitter account @PaulZag has around 4000 followers. I hit the API limits regularly on that account. I’ve managed accounts with 20,000 followers and the API limits become a major pain in trying to scale a campaign. Tweet Adder avoids all that drama.

It’s feature-packed:

• Automated Follows
• Automated unfollow (with a whitelist to protect your must follow friends)
• History of follows and unfollows
• Automated tweets (as well as RSS and @reply feeds)
• Twitter list integration
• Find people to follow
• Follow a users followers
• Random time delay for all actions
• Many, many, many more features.

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• Twitter Weekly Updates for 2011-03-20

Why are so many of my twitter friends caught out by this scam? These scams are most effective against users of mobile devices. It’s hard to read the misspelled URL that looks like twitter’s.

As this attack matures, the exact phrase used will change. The way to be safe on a mobile device is

1. use the twitter client for your device or a well known 3rd party client (like TweetDeck).
2. login on that client only
3. don’t trust a DM from a contact that does not have context (see below)
4. if you click on a shorted URL link that takes you to something that looks like twitter do not login – use your dedicated client program instead.

What is context? If you ask a friend to send you a picture and they reply with a URL, that is expected behaviour. If you didn’t ask for it and didn’t party at the Playboy Mansion with them last night, they don’t have a LOL photo of you. Assume they’ve been compromised and move on.

“Compromised” is very cloak and dagger but it’s also smart. At a time when the bad guys are selling compromised accounts and PC’s by the thousands, your login credentials are a commodity worth a fraction of a cent (e.g. 40EUR per 100,000 email addresses last night). So act like a secret agent and assume the worst, you’ll live longer.

Other phrases I’ve seen so far:

• There is a rumor/blog going around about you [URL] might want to read it
• Rumor has it there is some bad things about you
• I saw a real bad blog about you, you seen this?
• Found a funny picture of you!
• I cannot believe what this person is saying about you! it’s pretty nasty stuff
• You seen what this person is saying about you? <obfuscated URL> terrible things..
• Hey…you seen this yet? <obfuscated URL> some horrible rumors about you going around online…

Keeping safe online is the major challenge this century. If you are a parent you must get One Step Ahead: Empowering Parents in Today’s World

If you want more information on keeping safe online, I also recommend this great ebook Cyber Scams – a visual guide to 25 of the biggest Internet scams.

If you’ve already been scammed do the following

1. Change your password at https://twitter.com/settings/password
2. Revoke permission from any unknown applications at https://twitter.com/settings/applications

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• Gatwick Express
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• American or British Spelling

1. paradoxically I trust Google’s privacy commitment more than Facebook
2. Google let’s me take my connections with me when I leave
3. per post privacy options

But I realize that Facebook has 600 million users and so much better reach.

Here’s a tip for updating your Facebook status from Google+

1. go to http://www.facebook.com/mobile/ and copy your personalized upload email address
2. When sharing on Google Plus add that email address in the +add more people box.
3. You can create a circle with just email addresses of “update via email” services. Add that circle to any update you want shared on other services. My circle is called Statuses.

The update is limited to the first 45 characters and shows as “via Email”. I’ll update this post when I find a better way to do this.

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• Free Google Plus Invite
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I’ve got Google Plus Invites here for free. You do not need to have a gmail address to use Google Plus, but you will need to create a Google account for the email address you use.

To get an invitation, just comment below with the email address you want the invitation for and I’ll invite you. In the comment tell me how you found this page – if via a search, what were the search terms?

I’d appreciate a like, +1 or tweet to the ZagZ.com home page afterwards. Extra karma for googling  Zagz.com and clicking the +1 there too.

Update 12 September 2011: Visits to this post have vanished, so I’ll keep sending invitations if you ask, but I’ll not be monitoring this post as closely.

Update 6 August 2011: Google has introduced URL invites but they have 150 invite limit. I’m sending out email invites which currently have no limits.

Update 1 August 2011: Please remember to like this page on Facebook as well.

Update 19 July 2011: I will edit this section if I ever stop sending invitations. If this is still here, I’m still sending them out.

Update 15 July 2011: You don’t have to put your addresss in the body of the comment. Just use the Email field, it will be hidden from spam lists. Put your name or nick in the Name field too.

What is Google Plus?

Google Plus launched last week and is Google’s third and most complete go at social media. They are making it easy to share with your circle, it’s designed that way from the ground up. Plus people are talking about it being Google’s version of Facebook. But I think it’s better.

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