mediaczar

Introducing the Porter Novelli magic Twitter friend maker (beta)

A couple of days ago, I posted a map of all the Porter Novelli people we knew of who are tweeting. The list keeps getting bigger: at today’s count, there are 212 known Twitter people.

At the moment, I manage three Twitter accounts (thanks mostly to the excellent Twhirl Twitter client that lets me log in simultaneously to as many accounts as I like. Two of those accounts are Porter Novelli-related, so it was essential that I follow everyone. Of course, I could simply set up an auto-follow using something like Tweetlater , but that wasn’t going to work if people didn’t know about and follow those accounts in the first place.

So I pulled together a little seven-line perl script that would do this for me (included at the end of this post.) This was always going to be a personal tool, but when I looked at the map of current Porter Novelli Twitter people, it became clear that:

1. There are lots of new people in our company joining Twitter
2. They don’t have many friends yet. Twitter isn’t much fun when you don’t have friends.
3. If we could come up with some way for them to make friends with other people in our network quickly, then we’d have a more robust, more useful network

For various reasons it was hard for me to get the perl script working on this site as a tool for everyone. One of those reasons is that I don’t build very secure programmes, and if anyone entered their name and password on my site, they would be stored in my log files. While this would open fascinating opportunities for pranking, it would obviously compromise my reputation for high ethical standards should it ever get out.

So I commissioned someone to build a simple Twitter befriender. It’s rather shaky at the moment (the feedback is less than user-friendly for example) but here’s how it works.

1. You enter your Twitter username and password. They will remain private (only Twitter will see them)
2. The magic Twitter friend maker looks at the list we’re maintaining on Google Docs and tries to follow everyone on that list
3. It spits out a list of errors (people you may already be following or who have protected their feeds, for example.)

That’s it. Suddenly you’re following up to 200 new people. More than 75 people have used it already, and the Porter Novelli network is becoming stronger by the minute!

Feel free to have a play with the magic Twitter friend maker, but do read the caveats below.

Caveats

It only follows known Porter Novelli people on Twitter. You may not want to do this, although I cannot imagine why not.

Not everyone in Porter Novelli speak English all the time. We are an international agency after all and you have to take the rough with the smooth.

This is in beta. It may fail. If so, please leave a comment here, or send a tweet to @mediaczar. Please check your friend numbers before and after using the magic Twitter friend maker.

If you don’t have many followers already, the sudden rush of following activity may make you look a bit keen; this might affect your Twitter Grade. If you work for Porter Novelli, then this should all come out in the wash, somehow.

If you don’t already have lots of friends, the sudden increase may confuse you at first. But be reassured: using Twitter well kinda requires you to follow and be followed by lots of people. I recommend getting hold of a Twitter client like Twhirl or Tweetdeck and learning how to use it.

That should be it, I think. Updates will be added to this post.

Perl script

[code lang="perl"]#!/usr/bin/perl

use Net::Twitter;
my $twit = Net::Twitter->new(username=>"your username", password=>"password" );
my @usernames = qw(insert twitter usernames here separated by spaces);

foreach $user(@usernames) {
print "$user\n";
$twit->create_friend($user);
}

$twit->update("Just finished following all my Porter Novelli colleagues");[/code]

It uses the Net::Twitter perl module written by Chris Thompson (and is a profligate waste of a great module, BTW.)