If you fully realize the value of social media, then you’re constantly trying to parse, scrub, clean and otherwise organize your Twitter account. It’s a never-ending battle and often a steep, uphill one at that, but Tweepi can shift your effort into high gear – the geeky way.
Tweepi lets you know right off the bat that it may not be pretty and, as its tag line says, it’s still “very much a beta”, but boy does it do everything we have spent way too much time trying to do with other desktop clients and the Twitter website itself.
The “geekier, faster way to manage Twitter”, as it calls itself, offers four separate utilities, all of them “geeky”: Follow, Flush, Reciprocate and Cleanup.
We tried out the Seesmic Web contact manager recently, and while we were impressed by it, Tweepi might win just by the sheer number of times the word “geeky” appears on the site. Tweepi is like taking all of your Twitter friends, importing them and a whole slew of stats about how they use Twitter into Excel, and then incorporating interactivity.
We may not agree with all of the functions of Tweepi, but to each their own. Flush, for example, gets rid of users you follow who don’t follow you back. Depending on what you’re using Twitter for, this may be useless. If you’re looking for information, not conversation, then don’t bother. Reciprocate, on the other hand, “helps you find all the users that follow you, but you do not follow back” and can help you make sure you don’t fall on the other end of that Flush utility.
The two functions that really caught our attention, however, are Cleanup and Follow. Cleanup will show you all of the people you follow and let you sort through them by any number of criteria, from their link-to-tweet ratio to the last time they tweeted. In all, it offers 16 separate columns that you can toggle on your view.
Tweepi also gives you a set of preset targets to organize user lists. You can find “Twitterers who discuss much”, which compares the number of messages they receive with replies they send, or “Avoid linkless ramblings”, which sorts people you follow according to their link-to-Tweet ratio. If you’re nearing the follow limit, you can clear out inactive users or if you’re looking to get the word out there, you can look for people with “Higher reach or influence”.
The Follow feature lets you enter a username and look at all the people following that user, again with all of the sorting capabilities we just mentioned. So, if I’m looking for other people who are interested in cycling in Austin, for example, I might put in @mellowjohnnys, the Twitter account for Lance Armstrong’s local bike shop, and see who else is following them. It’s a different take on the usual process, which more often lets you look at who a particular user is following rather than who is following them.
Since it’s still in beta, we’re actually hoping that the Follow feature gets flipped around the other way too, at some point. @RWW, for example, has over a million followers. It is only following 1,486, however. We’d much rather look at who an account like that one is following than who is following it. If you’ll excuse us, we have some cleaning up to do.
