Find People by Keyword With Twitter Perch
by Lisa Hoover - Feb. 18, 2009Comments (2)
If you've been using Twitter a while then you've probably reached critical mass on following the people you know, following the people who follow you, and following the followers of the people you follow (got that?). It's possible to find new folks to get to know by using Twitter's search feature, but it's a time-consuming manual process.
Dublin-based Web app developer Iarfhlaith Kelly created an open source automated program called Tweet Perch that will do the searching for you based on keywords of your choice, then auto-follow them on your behalf.
It works like this: simply visit the Web site, enter your account information (or not, more on that in a minute), and choose a keyword that you want the app to watch for. Every day, Twitter Perch will comb through the public timeline, pluck out Twitterers who've used your keyword, and automatically set your Twitter account to follow them.
Of course, not everyone is comfortable submitting their Twitter password at an unknown Web site so Kelly has released the code for his project under the GPLv3 license so people are free to run it on their own servers. He also welcomes developers to alter his code to "extend its features."
While the vast majority of Twitter users are reputable, there are always a few bad apples that spoil the bunch. Kelly is aware his app could be used to spam Twitter so he's capped the amount of new followers to 20 per day.
"I’ve launched this tool in the hope that it will be useful for businesses who want to track their brands and engage with people on Twitter," Kelly says on his blog. "I think if it’s used properly then it will be a very useful extension of the Twitter Search features already available. However, if it’s used incorrectly it could reduce the value that Twitter provides to it’s users and potentially dilute the strong community bond that currently exists there."
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