Today, I had a lot of fun playing with twitter and its API. The reason for this is mainly because (as you may have noticed), I’m exploring why and how people can use twitter for marketing. This is a side of twitter that a lot of people don’t think about too much, but it’s still really interesting.

My conclusion is that getting a lot of followers isn’t particularly hard. There are a plethora of scripts out there that allow you to mass-friend people, and if you’ve read two posts I made earlier, it’s clear that CSVs full of twitterers who “follow you back” are available. There are so many twitterers who follow people back! It’s really quite interesting.

At the same time, there are limits. Twitter is aware that their wonderful software can easily be manipulated for the purpose of spam, and for this reason it has created follow limits as well as limits to the number of API calls any one account (or IP for that matter) can make. If you’re not a programmer: an API is an application programming interface, or essentially a set of rules/functions that have been made available by twitter to outside parties. So basically a third party can write software that automates a lot of stuff (e.g updating your twitter status or friending someone) — a good example is Twitterific or Echofon for your iTouch/iPhone. Limits to API calls basically restrict those softwares from updating every minute or say, following 300 people instantly. If everyone decided to check the latest updates on twitter every minute, the server strain would be unthinkable (and twitter would lose a ton of money just trying to keep everything up). So that’s why that is.

I’m still experimenting — sorry if you see some weird posts like those last two in coming days. The topic of using twitter for marketing purposes has really made me curious.

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