So I spend all my life on Twitter (according to my boss at least ) and there are certain tools that I need.

I explained in my last post how I have a separate account setup specifically for following people who I want to follow, but who don’t follow me back. I beleive Twitter should be a 2-way communication tool, but there are still people that use it as an RSS stream.

To transfer all of these people from my main account (@calvinrobinson) to my 1-way stream account (@calvinscat) I needed a tool to mass-follow ~200 people at once. Adding them individually would simply be too long.

I tried NinjaFollow, but this just wouldn’t work for me. It seems very temperamental these days – I was just receiving error after error. So I decided to just make my own.

I’ve played around with Python a little, and so I knew how simple it was, but oh my gosh… what a sexy language! With practically no experience with either Python or the Twitter API I was able to bang out an application that did exactly what I needed. The only problem was, my program required me to run the script manually each time. That’s when I had the idea of turning it into a web app. This way, other people can get some use out of it too.

Thus RogerThat was born.

At the moment it’s a really easy, if not ugly, tool for following multiple twitter accounts at once. I’ll expand it later, but right now I’m just really happy at how easy it was to get using the Twitter API. I will expand this in the next few days, I’ve got some interesting ideas ;D

I really don’t think I could get by without TweetDeck. I manage quite a few Twitter accounts for my company, but for my personal account(s) alone, I think TweetDeck is my saviour. Here’s why:

So I have two personal accounts, @calvinrobinson being my main actual Twitter account, that I use for communicating with people. But I feel Twitter is a 2-way communication service, so for the people who use it as a 1-way RSS stream I have another account altogether. @calvinscat follow’s people like Ashton Kutcher, Oprah, TechCrunch, Mashable: So Celebrities and News Streams basically.

So on TweetDeck I have

@calvinscat ‘All Friends’ stream, for my celebrity and tech/news streams
@calvinrobinson “People 2point0″ is the London2.0 scene, people like Marc Flores, Mike Butcher, Swannny etc.
@calvinrobinson “Chiefs” group, is my close friends column, Ruk Cooray, Aaron Sullivan and Aryel Abrahami etc.
@calvinrobinson ‘Mentions’, to see messages sent to me, obviously
@calvinrobinson ‘Direct Messages’ for trying to manage that nasty stream of DMs (please turn auto-DMs off folk!)

^ So that’s my main 5 TweetDeck columns. The ones I couldn’t do without. I used to have TweetScoop too, but that’s just one too many columns without going ‘thin’ style.

After the scroll I just have ‘Mentions’ columns for all my other accounts (mainly business related), to monitor conversations/references.

So I’ve been working at Net Communities for a couple of weeks now. Brilliant place to work – it’s such a cool environment, everyone just gells. It’s great to work in a web2.0 atmosphere. And I still have a lot of alcohol in my system, so excuse me if this sound cheesy, but it’s good to have a boss who actually understands web, and enjoys it the way you do – you know?

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