Twollow is a really cool tool to look for people who tweet about the things that you want to target. I thought it does not work but recently I have been getting more followers out of nowhere. I am not totally sure if the new followers came from Twollow or some of the Facebook group “Twitter… You follow me… I follow you“.

If followers is what you want, then join these sites:

• Twitter… You follow me… I follow you on Facebook
• Twitter on BlogCatalog
• Follow Me On Twitter – Please Post Your Twitter URL Here on Self-Starters Weekly Tips

Combine Twollow with Tweetlater and you’ve got yourself a really cool automated follower adding machine.

I was tempted to sign up for as many social networking accounts as possible but I prefer to keep it simple and have just a few accounts to manage. At the moment, I’m just reading up more about Twitter to learn how to use it properly. I am experiencing problems with getting my messages fit into the 140 character limit. I am also checking FriendFeed as it seems to have some great SEO benefits.

I wonder if it is just a gimmick to add as many friends and followers to make me look popular. I don’t think I can keep up posting random quotes about what I am currently doing to Twitter everyday. I don’t really see the purpose in doing so and it seems kind of boring to me. Strangely, some people love checking out what their friends are saying everyday.

Seth Godin says it is useless for small businesses. However, I see people like Joel Comm using Twitter and Facebook to promote their own products and web sites very well. I think we have to find a way to use it like Joel Comm if we want to use it to promote stuff.

I will add a box on my sidebar to display my latest Twitter status message very soon. It seems like people love these short status messages. I always get replies from my real friends about them. For now, I shall use Twitter and Facebook purely as a social tool.

I have not caught on the social networking hype of registering on sites like Twitter. I did not want to waste my time on things like Twitter because I am not a person who likes to check out what’s the latest news about other people except for my favourite band, Oasis.

A few weeks ago, I decided to test the status feature of Facebook. I was feeling happy and relieved that this unpleasant house mate of mine was going to move out soon in early August so I added a countdown message that went something like “3 more days to go”. Some of my friends started sending me messages asking me what I was counting down to!

When my house mate moved out, I changed my status message to something like “So long sucker, hope you don’t steal other people’s shampoo and take other people’s stuff in the future!”. A female friend of mine then asked me what caused me to get so upset.

Now I am beginning to understand why sites like Twitter are so popular. Some people just love these one-liners and have to know more. I think I should start using Twitter and some other similar sites like it even though I think they are dumb.

The problem is, I do not wish to login to all of my social networking sites to manually update all my status messages. I stumbled on a WordPress plugin called PingPress.fm that might do the trick. It works with Ping.fm, which is a free service that helps you to update all your social networks at one place. I will test it out and see how it goes.

Photo web hosts are also a good way to put all your pictures taken from time with family, friends and co-workers into one place to share with your friend or to store them safely. Whenever you sign up for social networking sites like Friendster, MySpace or Facebook, you can use image codes, HTML or links to place the pictures on your profiles. It’s a great way for the public to see just who you really are and get to know you as a person a little better.

Who Needs To Use Photo Web Hosting?

• Forum posters who would like to post pictures onto forum discussions
• Anyone who wishes to share their photos online
• Webmasters who would like to reduce the bandwidth usage on their own web sites by upload pictures to photo sharing sites
• Photographers, web designers and artists who would like promote their work on sites like social photo sharing sites like Flickr

Benefits of Photo Web Hosting Sites

There should be some form of photo to HTML tool for users to post their images to web sites, forum posts and social networking sites. This makes it easy for non technical users to insert photos into other web sites. Slideshows, picture cubes, and in more recent times videos, can be created to spice up your web site or social networking profiles. Even the popularity of picture phones have come into play for photo web hosting sites as you can now download pictures right to your phone. Best of all, you do not need to have your own web host to store your photos.

Disadvantages of Photo Web Hosting Sites

The only real disadvantage to using photo web hosting sites is the restrictions on photo sizes and bandwidth. It isn’t uncommon for a photo sharing site to disable your pictures once it has received a lot of hits from internet users. What happens is, they will ask you to upgrade your account to a paid account to continue the hosting of your photos. If you host your own photos on your own web site, you won’t have to deal with any of this.