iTunes recently released iTunes 10 and with it, came iTunes Ping. iTunes Ping is a social networking platform with a focus on music within iTunes . I am disappointed that Apple did not create a web site for iTunes Ping. I think that would be easier for most people to join in the fun.

You need an iTunes store account to create your iTunes Ping account. Again, this is another limitation for people who do not have iTunes music stores in their countries. I registered a iTunes USA store account some time ago with a USA forwarding address. Whenever I want to buy songs from iTunes, I have to go to eBay to purchase an iTunes gift card.

The problem with iTunes Ping is not a lot of artists have signed up for it. You’ll see about 200 plus early adopters and I can’t even find some of my favourite bands at the time of this writing.

Frankly, I am not impressed with iTunes Ping. Maybe Apple will improve it further but I don’t see the need to use it often at the moment.

Related articles by Zemanta:

• Ping Is Apple’s iTunes For Everything (techcrunch.com)
• iTunes Ping picker shows possibilities (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• Just two strikes and Ping’s out for me (nevillehobson.com)
• What is Apple’s Ping? and What Does it Mean for Musicians? (themusiciansguide.co.uk)
• Apple’s iTunes Ping social network (sporkings.com)
• Ping? Is Anyone There? (capturetheconversation.com)
• Re-imagining Ping (macworld.com)
• Ping: why all the fuss? No one I know uses iTunes any more (telegraph.co.uk)

Once you have added the tweetmeme retweet code to the prefix field of your twtterfeed feed, you tweets will be counted by tweetmeme.

This saves me a lot of time so that I do not need to manually post my blog posts to Twitter with the tweetmeme retweet code manually.

My followers have increased by 1766 in 45 days. That’s an average of 39 new followers per day. A lot of people are promoting the Twitter Traffic Machine on Twitter with an ad that goes something like “Thanks for the follow! Would you like to get 16,000 Followers in 90 days and make money? http://bit.ly/………”.

I doubt I would get 16000 followers in 90 days and I don’t really care. The “make money” portion of the Twitter Traffic Machine is to promote the eBook in your automated Twitter message to your new followers. That’s great for the author but if do not wish to promote his eBook on Twitter, you could promote something else.

Some of the tips in this eBook are pretty common knowledge for advanced Twitter users. I did learn a few new things about Twitter and Twitter tools that I have not tried. So if you think you know it all about Twitter, you may still find some gems in his eBook.

The author, Bill Cosby, demonstrates his system of automating the posting of great content to your Twitter account and other automation aspects of his system through 5 + videos. They are really easy to follow and implement. I got up and running within an hour.

The only drawbacks I see with this system is that you need to make sure your content sources are relevant to your niche. Some of the automated ways of getting content might get you a lot of unrelated posts, which may make your profile look “spammy”. I also wish the author could ellaborate more on how to make money with other products instead of just plugging his own.

All in all, for only $27, the Twitter Traffic Machine is a great buy.

Magpie is an ad network for Twitter. They’ll post tweets to your Twitter account on a predefined ratio of  tweets to ads. You could select to post ads as often as 1 ad after you post 1 Tweet or as spaced out as 1 ad after 200 Tweets. This is all done automatically for you so you don’t have to do anything.

Magpie’s ads come in pay per view, pay per click, pay per sale and pay per lead. You may choose to manually select the ads you wish to post to your Twitter account or let Magpie handle it automatically. Another great feature is to prepend the Magpie ads with a custom text like “ad:”.

2. Twittad

Twittad does not post Tweets to your Twitter account. Instead, it displays a background image to your Twitter account. Twittad calculates the estimated monthly ad cost of your Twitter account and you may edit that amount to whatever amount you think your Twitter is worth. The more targeted followers, the more money your Twitter account is worth to advertisers.

Mine’s worth only $265.71 per month with my 3000 or so followers at the time of this posting. Maybe my Twitter account would be worth $2650 per month with 30000 followers? Hmmm.. Who knows?

3. Twtad

Twtad is very similar to Magpie but it isn’t automatic. You have to click on the ads and post them to your Twitter account(s). The ads seem limited in my account. I hope the number of ads grows because I only see a few ads related to my target audience.

Is that a better way to retweet? I don’t think so. Everyone is used to using “RT” at the moment and it would take a lot of effort for us to change our ways.

I would rather use Tweetdeck to post retweets at the moment. Tweetdeck uses “RT” so I shall stick to that. I am just too lazy to do anything else.

Please Retweet Me replaces your normal way of sending manual tweets. Instead of logging into Twitter.com to send your tweets, go to Please Retweet Me instead.

Please Retweet Me adds something like “http://pleasert.me/XXX” to your tweet. When someone clicks on that link, they will be forwarded to Twitter with a message with “RT @yourtwitterusername” and “http://pleasert.me/XXX”.

I find this a lot more convenient for people to retweet your tweets. Not everyone knows how to retweet yet and this could encourage them to try it.

Twitoria finds your friends that haven’t tweeted in a long time so that you can remove them. The problem with Twitoria is you cannot remove your friends from Twitoria. You need to login to Twitter, click on the Twitter user’s profile in Twitoria and remove them.

2. Twitter Karma

Twitter Karma is my favourite follower tool. It lets me delete everyone who does not folow me with a few clicks of my mouse. You can mass follow, delete and block people with Twitter Karma, which would take you ages to do on Twitter itself.

3. Tweepler

Tweepler displays a list of new followers of your Twitter account. Click on the left arrow to follow them back or the right arrow to ignore them. I didn’t find this as useful as Twitter Karma because you can only process 10 Twitter members at a time.

4. Tweet Later

TweetLater lets you automatically follow people who follow you or you could choose to manually screen through your new followers. Sometimes, it fails to automatically follow people who follow you. That is why you need an alternative service like Twitter Karma to complement TweetLater.

5. Friend or Follow

FriendorFollow is pretty useless in my opinion. It shows you a list of people who do not follow you back, a list of people you are following and a list of mutual friends. However, you cannot delete or follow people with FriendorFollow.

6. Twitual

Twitual is similar to FriendorFollow. It does not allow any following, unfollowing or ignoring features from their web site. This is just a reference tool.

7. TwitIn

TwitIn didn’t work when I tried to use it so I cannot comment much about it at the moment.

Conclusion

Twitter Karma and TweetLater are my favourite tools to manage my Twitter followers. TweetLater automates most of the following of my Twitter followers, while Twitter Karma ties up the loose ends.

NameCheap uses Twitter for competitions and I think it is a wonderful idea.

They will be giving away three domain names every hour on the hour for two weeks on Twitter.  The top two players to answer the most questions correctly as well as one player at random will win customizable Dell Inspiron Mini Netbooks up to $500.

We could certainly use NameCheap’s idea for our own businesses.

Check out the ATI Catalyst Twitter to see how they update ATI customers with the latest drivers and news. ATI has added more personality to their update service by having Terry Makedon, their Mgr. Catalyst Product Management, to post updates on Twitter. It beats looking at a plain machine generated update anytime.

Is this a growing trend? You bet! Will RSS be redundant soon? No way! I follow ATI Catalyst’s feed via RSS and not on Twitter itself. I think of Twitter as an add-on for RSS feeds. RSS feeds feel so naked without FeedBurner or Twitter.

There are pros and cons of sending automated direct messages on Twitter. I believe the number one reason for auto sending welcome direct messages, auto following and auto unfollowing people on Twitter is to save TIME! Who has the time to manually do all this once you receive a lot of new followers everyday?

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