Twitter Wars - TweetDeck vs. @optmeout

Are you on Twitter? If not, ignore this post.

There’s a Twitter app called TweetDeck. People set it up so it auto-follows people who follow them, PLUS, it can send a direct message (DM) to that new follower with whatever message the TweetDeck person sets up.

I appreciate people following me back, but I don’t really appreciate the generic autofollow DM that gets sent. Takes all the “social” out of “social media” for me. Instead, it’s like an auto-respond email, making me feel slightly sleezy for following that person in the first place. Kinda like a band groupie.

Everyone has a different opinion on how to use Twitter and the Twitter tools third parties are creating. I believe we each create our own Twitter experience, make up our own rules, and choose how we’re going to interact with our unique Twitter community in the same way we do in our 3D lives.

With that said, here’s how to stop those TweetDeck autofollow DMs, if you’re someone who doesn’t want that as part of your experience.

Go to http://www.twitter.com/optout
Follow them
They’ll follow you back.
Wait til you get the email saying they’ve followed you.
Then, go back to their page, and unfollow them.
(You do this by clicking the green triangle next to the word Follow. The area will expand and you can change your follow status there by clicking on Remove. DO NOT BLOCK THEM by choosing block over on the right. “block” is a ding on that user, and should be reserved for spam.)

Doing this ONLY works for stopping the TweetDeck autofollow DMs! You can still get them from other applications that have this feature. But there’s several people on Twitter who claim they’ve seen a drastic reduction of these DMs just from doing this.

Now, if someone can figure out a way to stop the “click here to get rich” people from signing up and following me. THAT would be awesome.