Twitter, as most of you must be knowing by now, is the fastest growing social networking site with million of users as their members. Obviously, i am part of it as well and I’m simply loving it. I joined twitter on 7th of March’2009 which apparently was pretty late considering the fact that twitter was launched publicly on August of 2006

Twitter

Twitter is growing at a rapid speed. Probably faster than any other social networking website. Simplicity has really played a great role in it’s success. Twitter is all about “What are you doing?” and the idea of connecting with other people brings in million of people worldwide to join and use twitter. It also acts as a real time short messaging service as it can be used via cell phones, various desktop applications n API’s and of course from the twitter website itself. The best part is, that you can follow many popular celebrities on Twitter and know what they are up to, And if you lucky enough, you might end up being good friends and have long chats with them.

There is however one thing that most twitter users do not know and there are not many source you can get this information from. Twitter have set some following and daily follow limits that you should be aware of. I have listed the limits below along with a detailed description on all.

• Maximum Following Limit : Twitter has set the maximum following limit to 2000 or 110% of your total followers. This means, that you can follow only 2000 people in total, until and unless you have that many followers as well. Calculating 110 % for 2000 followings, you should have at least 1820 people following you in order to raise your limit of 2000 followers. In simpler terms you first limit is of 2000 followers and thereafter you can follow maximum of 110% of the total followers you have. For example if you have 5000 followers, you will be able to follow a maximum of 5500 twitter users only.
• Daily Following Limit : I have noticed many people asking me this very question on twitter pretty often. How many people can i follow on twitter every day? Well, the answer is simple. Twitter limits the number of accounts that a single person can follow in a day to 1,000. Thereafter, either your account will be flagged, suspended, banned or probably you will not be able to follow any one else! My advice would be to keep it under the scanner. Do not follow more than 500 members a day.
• Maximum Follower Limit : So how many people can follow you on a daily basis? Answer would be, infinity. There are no limits on that. It’s out of your control as to how many people follow you. So it would be little stupid to have a follower limit. (You can however control the number of people that follow you. Go to settings and check the box which says “Protect my Updates”. Thereafter people will have to send request to you so that they can follow you and only those will be allowed whom you approve.)

I tried to explain as easily as i could but i may have messed up a little, while ignoring all the technical terms that i could have used. So if i didn’t make sense, Roll Out on Floor and Laugh Out Loud ROFLOL. Thereafter, just use the comment section and ask me the thing you didn’t understand. I will make it more clear for you!

Alright, so presuming that i have explained the twitter limits successfully, i think it’s a good time to mention some of the Twitter tools that i really prefer and recommend for all twitterers.

• Twitter Karma : It’s one tool that i use on a daily basis. If you ever notice my stats (except on Friday’s due to #F0llowFriday participation), you will see that my stats of people whom i am following and my followers are always the same. I use twitter karma for keeping such stats. You simply have to login by filling up your twitter email address and password or you can sign in with twitter ID itself. Once signed in, it will find all your twitter followers and people whom you follow and very briefly it will show three categories of people. First one being people who follow you and you follow them back. Second will be of people who are following you but you are not following them back. Third and last category is of people whom you are following but they aren’t following you back. So thereafter, it’s very simple. I just select people who are not following back, select them all by a single click of button provided on site and “Bulk Unfollow” them. Similarly with people whom i am not following back, i select them all and “Bulk Follow” them. So now you know. You can’t escape me if you unfollow me as i will do the same for you!
• Twitter Follower : It’s a very very new site and just started two days back. Apparently the site is owned by John Chow! I first read about it on his web blog. Here is the link >> “Twitter Follower Launch”. I will have to say that he got a great domain for the tool. It matches perfectly with the role of this tool. It’s basically a well organized list of all those twitter users who have agreed to follow back each and every user who follows them. I signed up with them yesterday night and my Twitter stats have gone up by nearly 150 users in less than 12 hours. It really works and it’s highly recommended. Also, the tool has a mass unfollow button that unfollows all users who are not following you back. That is great but Twitter Karma and FriendOrFollow.com already does that so nothing very cool about it. There is one thing though, the site certainly do what it says it will. But overall, the site sucks as there is no design on homepage, no contact us, no about us, no feedback or suggestion form. Maybe it will come up soon as the site is still new but i expected better looks from a John Chow’s website!
• TwitPic : You know you can’t share pics on twitter but TwitPic solves that problem for you. I have it bookmarked although i am yet to make use of it and explore it in all ways. But i love the concept and i love how it helps in shortening image URL’s for the tweeple! So, if you ever feel like sharing a pic, just upload it to Twit Pic, then tweet the url it provides and all Twitter friend of yours would be all to see it,and even comment on it.
• Twitter Counter : I love stats and there are at least dozen web tools that work with twitter statistics. However, i really like Twitter Counter of the lot. First of all they provide a button with my follower stats on it. You can see that in action on the right side of my blog just above the flags/language translator. Besides that, their stats tell me about the total followers i have, how many followers have been added since yesterday and what is the likely prediction for tomorrow or 30 days from now on. It even let’s you tweet these stats. Lastly, it also display your Global or local rankings among some 2 million twitter users who are hooked up with Twitter Counter.

I did want to mention TweetMeMe.com which basically works like Digg.com. It shows the hottest stories on twitter. It’s user voted concept wherein twitter guys retweet the stories and most popular stories show up on the main website of TweetMeMe. You will see there widget on my site also and if you can then don’t forget to retweet my post! Now why i didn’t mention it along the above tools is because i consider it more of web site rather than a web tool. Pretty simple

I do use some more twitter tools but the above mentioned twitters tools are the most popular and often used. I hope you like them and i will appreciate your comments on this article. Thanks!

As many of you must be knowing, twitter is THE next best thing that happened to internet social networking. Other social networking sites like MySpace and Google Orkut, etc may simply are fading out slowly and will soon go down as memories. I do not mean to say that those networking sites weren’t good. They had their days but simply can’t keep up with the growing trend of networking. Facebook is still pretty good networking site but in my opinion, i still think Twitter is far better. Anyways……

I basically wrote this post for people who have already signed up with twitter or are really thinking of the same. I made an account a week back and am really enjoying my stay in there. I have followed some 900 people so far including likes of Lance Armstrong, Britney Spears, Barack Obama, CNN, John Chow, Shoemoney, Problogger, Gul Panag and many many others. I really don’t feel ashamed to follow many others randomly as it gives me a chance to know them better. And you know what, many people think on the same lines. Out of 900, around 455 tweeple (twitter people) have followed me back and that does include John Chow and ProBlogger. It feels good to be followed by so many people. It’s basically your social network or your fan following. So basically, everything is going in the right direction. Perhaps, this much information on twittering might interest some of you to join it right away. Am really hoping to motivate my good friend Nicole Price on to twitter.

Okay, so moving ahead. Joining twitter is one part of deal. How do you go to twitter plus stage?

Well, making your twitter profile look unique is one way to go. If you are keen on making an impact with your brand name, then probably a good designed profile is the best solution. And when it comes to twitter profile designing, there is one and only Hugh Briss from Twitter Images. He has already created twitter backgrounds for some of the Internet biggest bloggers like John Chow, ProBlogger, DesignerDepot and many others in all kind of niche business. He charges $100 for the twitter background design, which considering your brand is pretty reasonable amount. Either you can have a great “branded” design from Twitter Images or you can probably have the same backgrounds that million other twitter users are using. It’s all about the brand and about being professional.

So if you think your brand really matters to you, i would recommend you to at least visit Twitter Images and see the designs yourself. I am sure you will be fully satisfied with the design from Hugh Briss.

If you however cannot afford $100 for the design, you may want to checkout the other free but good looking backgrounds from Twitter Images.

Update: I actually had an affiliate link to Twitter Images.com, but if you have been keeping up with that site, you might be knowing that Hugh Briss has discontinued the affiliate system. Now i cannot delete this article for content issues, so i have removed my affiliate link and placed a direct link to his site. Thanks

Twitter

I know am pretty late in doing this, but i just signed up with Twitter.com.

Honestly, i originally saw Twitter as an useless tool. I don’t like many of the social networking sites anyways. So Twitter was no exception. But i guess something about the way it works. It really caught my attention once again. And i ended up signing up with them.

Those who do not know what Twitter is, well, it is a free social messaging utility. It is a great application to stay in touch and keeping up with your friends, no matter where you are and what you are doing. You can send instant mobile updates for friends or you can simply message via twitter from web. In summarized words, Twitter is free messaging service for friends.

Why i thought Twitter was useless?

Well, very honestly, no one cares what the hell you are up to. No one cares what you are doing. Everyone is busy in his/her own damn life. But this didn’t stop increasing number of twitters and tweets from coming up. People telling the world what they are doing in 140 characters or less.

What interested me now?

I am now on twitter. This wasn’t a sudden interest. I have been reading a lot about it in recent few days. And what i realized after all was that Twitter is not just a web application. It is a great social networking tool. But the fact that all the user status are searchable, it makes it more of a search engine. Now, i started searching for people who thought about on same lines and ended up visiting ArtFagCity.com weblog wherein i found this post on twitter.

Here are his four major point that he mentioned

“Twitter isn’t just a web app, it’s a search engine.”
“Twitter is a filter.”
“Twitter is a headline generator ideal for scanning.”
“Twitter is a semi-permeable membrane (excuse the cliche), that allows users to filter the information coming in, while maximizing the distribution outwards.”

In just four points, Twitter was compared to Google, Feedburner and Facebook. And in many ways it turned out to be better than Google or facebook. And that was it. This post prompted me to sign up with twitter immediately.

By the way, the news that Twitter is integrating a search engine on it’s homepage also prompted me for signing up, as this shows that this social networking application ain’t gonna stop ith major hurdle cleared. They are going to come into search engine industry, the move that will make them a competitor of Google or Facebook. They can surely be better than Facebook with that move but perhaps they won’t be a big threat to Google. Anyways, i see bright future for Twitter. So joining em, isn’t something worth ignoring.

Hey, if you didn’t notice. Facebook redesigned the user’s home page and the profile page. I see that more as a twiiter page now. Many have felt that this redesign is actually an attempt to compete with the real-time social messaging offered by Twitter. So tough competition ahead for everyone.

Anyways, enough of talks. I have signed up  with twitter and that’s the major news in this post . I have no followers as on yet but you can add me to your twitter if you want some crappy, useless, not bothering updates from me.

I will try to add you to my follow list as well. Just let me know if i don’t.

My Twitter Profile: http://twitter.com/SharatJaswal.