…is dep­re­cated. When I started this project a cou­ple of months ago, Twit­ter was in its early stages and far from being as spam-flooded as now. While the sys­tem worked per­fectly for a cou­ple of month, at some points more and more users began turn­ing off the auto-follow fea­ture as an increas­ing num­ber of spam accounts became more and more annoy­ing. Keep­ing in mind the cur­rent state of Twit­ter, such an auto-follow list doesn’t make sense any more, so I decided to remove the list.

But the increas­ing suc­cess of Twit­ter did not only show us the down­sides of tweet-spam but also pro­duced a cou­ple of very inter­est­ing mash-ups. In the Last weeks I found out that Tweet­Later Pro’s brand-new “FriendFinder” fea­ture and Pretty Link Pro’s Pretty-Bar are the two most effi­cient strate­gies if you want to increase your fol­low­ers with tar­get­ted micro-bloggers and leave spam­mers and feed-accounts out in the cold. Take a look, Tweet­Later, an online-mash-up ser­vice as well as Pretty Link, a Word­Press plu­gin for using your own domain as a URL-shortener, are avail­able in free trial versions:

For his­tor­i­cal reasons…

…I’ve left the old text online. Thanks for vis­it­ing — I’ll keep a sharp eye on our favorite micro-blogging ser­vice and I will keep you updated about my expe­ri­ences (by now I run one of the largest Euro­pean accounts with more than 30k fol­low­ers. Feel free to fol­low me; I don’t auto-follow any more, but I take a short look at the timelist of all new con­tacts and fol­low back every­body who has some­thing inter­est­ing to say:

twitter.com/datadirt

Like all web 2.0 ser­vices, twit­ter works best on a give-take (rec­i­p­ro­cal) basis. That’s why I am start­ing this list which will help you to build a lot more twit­ter fol­low­ers much faster than you usu­ally could, and it’s a great way to pro­mote your own account, too! There are a cou­ple of ser­vices out there that offer an auto-follow option mean­ing that you auto­mat­i­cally fol­low every new user who fol­lows you. This is a list of such accounts — which basi­cally means that all you have to do is fol­low those guys and you are sure to increase your twitter-followership very fast, which is extremely use­ful if you start new accounts. Update: I have a done a major update today (2009–04-26) and split the list into three sub­lists: Eng­lish, Ger­man and other accounts. This will make the list a lot more usable as it keeps grow­ing and grow­ing. Also, I’ve added a mini-FAQ: please read and save you and me some time.

To make tar­geted fol­low­ing a lit­tle eas­ier, I added a cou­ple of addi­tional info. Every entry con­sists of a link to the twit­ter account, three tags that spec­ify the gen­eral top­i­cal field of the account and finally and optional lan­guage entry which only applies to twit­ter­ers who are not tweet­ing in Eng­lish. Being part of this list of course means that you will gain many fol­low­ers your­self — the longer this list, the greater the gain for all tweet-geeks involved.