Want 5000 Followers? That’ll Be $267 Please.

I am not at all talented in sales and marketing. @CostaVidaFred among many others on Twitter have that expertise. In the radio business I concentrate on creating the product and letting our sales team sell it.

That being said, I still have my doubts about dumping a significant amount of cash into something that sounds sketchy at best. The folks at usocial.net are promising you 5000 Twitter followers in 21 days for just $267. There are other tiers available for different prices as well.

Okay great. How do they do that? From what I can tell by reading the purchase agreement, it’s through the use of an “advertising campaign which involves the use of social bookmarking sites.” Huh. Well how will that get me 5000 followers? What will the ad say? What social bookmarking sites will they use? What 5000 Twitter users will they target? What percentage of the Twitter followers will be spam? Too many questions I can’t find answers to before I click the purchase button.

If anyone has used this service and it has worked well for them, please tell me your story. At face value, I look at these guys like that email from the English language challenged person who wants to transfer a million dollars to your bank account if you just provided him with your account number and social.

You can get your own 5000 followers for free. It’s called participation. Become involved in connecting with people and your followers will grow quickly, while you spend your hard earned money on more important things like that limited edition Star Trek Pez collection.

You Tube Tweeter

Twitpic is the best way to share photos on Twitter. If only it were as easy to share You Tube videos on Twitter. That’s the problem that YouTube Tweeter tries to solve.

When you go to youtubetweeter.com you enter your Twitter username and the YouTube URL of the video you want to share. It then creates a short URL link and allows you to tweet your video by sending you to Twitter and automatically entering the tweet for you.

Now here’s where the magic of YouTube Tweeter comes in. When someone clicks on the URL you’ve tweeted, rather than sending them to You Tube, it overlays your video on your own Twitter page and displays a count of how many views your video has received from your tweet. Pretty slick!

Who do we have to thank for this magic? A guy by the name of Kevin Sherman who you can follow @bubbleguru.

Tweetie For Mac OS

Full disclosure right off the bat here. I don’t own a Mac. That doesn’t mean I don’t want to own a Mac. In fact as soon as this piece of junk HP Pavillion that I’m pounding this post out on dies, the first place I’m headed to is the Apple store.

I do however own a first gen iPhone and have downloaded the Tweetie app for it. I heard all the buzz about this amazing app for the iPhone so I figured I’d cough up the $3 and give it a spin. I wish I could get my $3 back. Not because I didn’t like it. It’s a great app. It’s just that I already had all the features I wanted that Tweetie offers in the free Twitterfon app. Free always wins with me. (Or cheaper, hence my HP Pavillion)

Now Tweetie has arrived on the Mac and the buzz appears to be back again for the desktop version. It’ll set you back $15 or you can get the free ad supported version.

It’s a feature rich app that takes up very little screen space. The feature that I would enjoy most is the ability to drag and drop images into the posting window for upload to photo sharing services like TwitPic. I can add pictures in my favorite client, Tweetdeck, but I’m lazy and love a drag and drop option.

Since I can’t actually use the app with the HP logo on my lid, I highly recommend the review over at The Apple Blog.

If you’re on a Mac and have tried the app out, let me know what you think about it in the comments. Feel free to tell me all about the virtues of a Mac while you’re at it. If you’d like to float me a small loan, I’ll be happy to learn those for myself.

Get Tweetie for Mac

Man Builds Chair That Tweets Passing Gas

This could very well be the most assinine (pun intended) use of Twitter ever. Although, if the iFart iPhone app can make $10,000 a day in the iTunes app store, why wouldn’t people want to build their own chair that tweets (or should that be toots?) everytime its occupant passes gas.

I’m not quite sure this even works, as it just seems so much easier to make a Twitter account for your chair and claim that it’s tweeting your gas. However if you REALLY want to try an build the real thing, instructables.com has the…uh… instructions.

If you’re just don’t have the skills and are more interested in following a farting office chair, you can do that too @OfficeChair.

Give it a week and soemone will make a toilet that tweets every time you flush.

Flutter

As Twitter-mania reaches new levels, Slate V presents a mockumentary about a company that wants to take microblogging to the next level.

Baker Tweet: Muffins Are Done!

Imagine you’re walking down the street on a beautiful sunny morning just wishing you could catch those muffins at the local baker just as they come out of the oven hot and fresh. Just a dream? Not anymore when you follow your local baker on Twitter and he uses Baker Tweet!

Baker Tweet is a service that lets bakeries send out tweets whenever they take something fresh out of the oven. What makes it unique is the tweet is sent from a control box mounted on the wall. Turn the dial to whatever pastry just came out of the oven, and the appropriate tweet is sent out to all hungry followers. The box is “bakery proof” so no worries of flour mucking up the system.

Clever? Yes. Marketable? Doubtful.

There is one bakery in London currently using the system. Probably a friend of the guy who made it. You can follow The Albion Cafe in London @AlbionsOven and when you get that tweet that the scones are fresh out of the oven get to London as fast as you can!

http://www.bakertweet.com