Ive silently been working on a little project to manage my sometimes huge email lists. Ive finally finished it up and ive been using it for my own uses for quite some time. But thought i may aswell let it out to the world. So here it is :

Download Here

The usual rules apply with donating/sharecash etc. Im sure you’ve already heard me say it a million times. So enjoy and let me know if there is any problems as always. To be honest im thinking this first version may be a bit buggy because i basically have my set routines, and havnt pushed it much. But as always flick me an email if you have any issues.

I spent all of last night tidying up small fixes here and there and finally its been released. It looks pretty suave too! Download Here

The main addition to this version was the “Account Manager” :

Im sure many of you will enjoy this. Hopefully it saves you a tonne of time not having to type in the the usernames (Or even remember all of them). So download and take a look, o and ofcourse let me know what you think. I always get really nervous when i release something new, always scared that i may have forgotten to remove debugging code etc. But fingers crossed all goes well!

O and P.S Dont forget to add a text file called accounts into the same directory

O yeah. And i almost forgot. I added a manual to this version which you can download seperately if you need it . I whipped it up in 5 mins so bare with it for now. Maybe ill create a more professional one in the future, but for now this is all you’ve got.

I finally got over my procrastination and started working on the new version of Twitter Friend Adder today. Ive been epic lazy as of late, and trying to avoid any work with it. Its a bit of a pain, going through code that you no longer like. I have to say that Twitter Friend Adder was probably one of my very first creations, and it shows in the code. Some of the lols are :

• Couldn’t be bothered learning how to parse XML properly, so just used string functions and divided it up into parts. Which is fine, but its a complete mess to modify now.
• Alot of the interactions with twitter don’t wait for responses. It adds a friend, but doesn’t check if it actually accepted that friend request. Not really an issue, but just means i have to recode it when i do my new method.
• The threading is absolutely hectic. I learnt threads specifically for this and it shows. I may implement a proper background worker, but for now this kind of works.

I guess i could go on and on. But most people reading this wont give a sh** anyway about how i code it. Just that it works . So onto the new functions so far

• Integrated account manager, so it keeps a list (Or you can import a text file) of your twitter accounts. Means less typing, but still supports you typing in your own usernames. So you can use it for the long haul or still keep it for a short spin.
• 1 gazillion bug fixes. Including threading not ending so even if the bot finishes, you have to press stop then start again to go with another account. Also allowing the delay to be up to 30 seconds, for nice slow friend adding.
• Check username and password first! This is a biggie because so many people were typing in the wrong  twitter username and password, and my application wouldnt tell them. Resulting in locked out accounts.

O and there is things i am planning to implement in the coming days:

• Add friends of a friend. So as an example, you type in “aplusk”. And it will add all of ashton kutchers friends that are following him.
• Add random friends. Not really a feature, just for those who are too lazy to think up keywords to target.
• With your list of accounts, do a global check to see if they are banned, and tell you which ones are.
• Reporting feature of each account. As in you can check followers etc of each account, without having to login to twitter. Kind of like a dashboard type of thing.

And ofcourse there is the “Hmmmm…Yeah… Maybe…” list things on my list :

• Run accounts after each other. So add 1k friends on each account one after the other, without having to touch anything.
• Auto tweeter, for retweeting the same message.
• A tweetlater type “upload your tweets” so that it can auto message for you all day long.

And thats about it! Im pretty sure ive forgotten something, but for now this is the definitive list. From the last list, if you actually REALLY want something bad, tell me and ill implement it. Otherwise those will go into the “some other day” basket. If all goes well it should be released some time next week.

P.S O yeah, and xcubic, i havnt forgotten about you. Ill make this one have an installer

P.S.S Dont forget this is a WINDOWS based application. I know alot of you will scream the the “upload your tweets” feature. Remember you will still need your computer on in this time (Unless you have a Windows VPS, which i doubt many of you have).

Alright, i think its time for a rant. The amount of times i go to DigitalPoint or Warrior Forum and see someone trying to sell a twitter ebook with a “twitter friend adder program bonus” is starting to sicken me. Some of the time it isn’t my software, but quite a few times i have seen it up there. Now the thing is, how can you try and get someone interested in your package by offering a “bonus”. Its like incentivising the sale. Most people will say that, “Well they aren’t selling it, they are just offering it as a “bonus”". Yeah, right, same, thing. Some people are even trying to sweeten the deal by offering a bonus of “cracked hummingbird”. What. The. Hell. Cracking it is one thing, but selling it is quite another.

I’ve added a new part to the Twitter Friend Adder page as a small TOS. Just stating that you cant offer it as a “bonus” or “incentive” of any type. More then likely it wont stop people but hopefully it will atleast let them know it isn’t appreciated. And atleast it will give me a reason to troll the hell out of their thread.

Now don’t get me wrong. Got a mate who wants a twitter friend adder? Give it to him! See someone on a forum asking for one? Hand the software his way!  Someone in IRC begging for twitter friend adding software? Throw it in his face!  There is a big difference to someone giving it out for free, And  sweetening a deal with something that 1. They don’t own the rights to, 2. Is free anyway.

P.S Feel free to email me if you bought a package with the software included. I would love to know support[at]pyrogenicmedia.com

You would not believe how many emails and messages i get everyday. Telling me that i should put a price on some of my software. They all have their reasons but the most common one is “because someone else is selling the same thing”. Generally this is aimed at hummingbird‘s price tag of $200. I will concede that hummingbird has a got a leg up functionality wise (To be honest its probably a bit bloated). But my application is aimed at a totally different user base. Selling mine for $200 just would not work for me. Here’s why :

5 – My software is aimed at marketers and internet savy people
With a quick look at the people using hummingbird and even its sales page. It aims to drag in the average internet user into buying the package. It tries  to take people not already marketing on twitter and turn them that way. The people downloading my software already know about the power of twitter, and just want something to upscale it. These people to be honest if they wanted anything, they would get it free, cracked or otherwise. Which brings my onto my next point.

4 – Someone, somewhere, will crack it
To be honest this isn’t a biggie for me. But the hassles of keeping up with trying to hide my code and all the call backs to check licensing just seems all a bit too CIA for me. Using machine hardware codes are an option but it seems so damn draconian that you should expect someone to use your software on the one PC, or that the person should only own one pc.

3 – It would be selling someone elses code
While hummingbird it seems does not use twitters API, mine does. And although twitter doesn’t code anything for its users, it sure as hell hands it to them on a plate. All i have done is strung the code together, looped it, and given a nice interface for the user. While there is no legality issues with selling something that utilizes an API of any kind, it definitely isn’t a nice feeling to be in that position.

2 – Lifetime updates
Lifetimes updates are hell. It is the bane of every software company around the world. I don’t want to be supporting this software in 5 years time, maybe even within a years time i may have moved onto something new. But there will always be people that are ready to complain a second after you announce that you are ending support. Monthly membership fees do work, but it can be a large workload to keep up with activating and deactivating of licenses.

1 – Because im naive
Even forgetting about my other points. Even if everything else fell into place. I think this is always going to be my biggest hurdle. Im sure you’ve heard it a million times over from the torrent/pirate community, “I want to download it, and if i like it, ill donate or pay for it”. Yeah, f***ing, right. I still live in hope that people downloading the software will donate sometime. Ive had literally thousands of downloads of my software, reams of support emails telling people to install .net framework, a stack of messages from people saying if i can help them to get it working right they will donate. It doesn’t happen. I don’t expect people to donate, but i live in hope that atleast a few will. To those who have donated (A handful have), i thank you. To the others, well i live in hope. But for now you are my kryptonite keeping me from selling software.

I’m sure many of you have noticed that you now cannot add more than 500 friends per day per account. Some of you probably wouldn’t have even noticed this, but others of you that go balls to the wall with adding may be feeling the pinch. Yes, it seems twitter is starting to crack down on spam. Starting with tweetlater, now moving onto adding limits. It doesnt look like the API limits have been changed. So for the mean time, just take it easy with the adding and you shouldn’t find yourself getting banned any time soon.

In other news Twitter has spruced up its website with a few fancy buttons here and there. If you haven’t noticed, log into one of your accounts and view your follower/following pages. Alot of new features!  It isn’t all good news however. For the thousands of people that use Hummingbird for their automation needs, it seems they will be out of the game for a while. I’m not really sure how hummingbird works but i was really surprised that it would use the web interface at all. That would be certainly the last place i would look for a way of programming something. Especially when Twitter has an API all for the ready.

Hummingbird being down isnt all bad news however. Those people are rushing to find another way to add friends, and well, it just so happens that mine fits the bill

You can now download my latest application here.

It is simply a by-product of something else i was creating that needed a way to “spin” articles. It works on a simple token/synonym policy which you can read about below. Its still in very early stages yet and there is quite a few things i would like to implement, namely a thesaurus lookup so you don’t have to come up with things from the top of your head.

How To Use :

Put your main article into the top window. For each word that you think can be substituted for another, you put into brackets with a pipe (|) between the words.

Example :

(Hi|Hello|Hiya|Hi There), My Name Is (Wade|Scott)

The above example could output

• Hi, My Name Is Wade
• Hiya My Name Is Wade
• Hi There My Name Is Scott
• Hi There My Name Is Wade

And so forth. So in essence, it will pick randomly from each of the available choices.

Any problems don’t be scared to send me an email and ill always do my best to help.

… But its not. You see on Friday night (New Zealand time, so we are GMT +13, almost a day ahead), I got the sudden urge to start coding a new bot. I had absolutely no idea what i was going to make, just that i needed to make something. I cant be forever the guy who blogs about twitter you know!

I saw alot of people hunting for something that could extract email addresses from the inbox of a gmail account. Seemed easy and sure enough there were many products already on the market. Some costing upwards of 80 USD. After investigating i found this. It is basically a feed from google showing your latest messages in your inbox (Note it shows unread emails) of which you can also grab the from address there. I coded till 4am working up a nice interface and all, i really went all out.

I created the download page, uploaded it. Then thought i better give it one last test before i tell the world. Shit. I ballsed up big time . You see in my initial tests i tested with no more then 2 unread emails. For this last test i thought i may aswell go the whole 9 yards. So i selected every email in my inbox (900+), and set them to unread. Then ran my application. Well… Alot of swearing ensued, and then slammed the lid of my laptop and straight to bed.

The problem is that on googles feed, it will only show you the latest 20 messages. And there isn’t really any way to mark the first 20 as read, then continue on looping through 20 messages at a time. So i basically coded for hours on end to no avail. If someone still wants the application (Or the source code) just send me an email. But overall,  it was an epic fail that i will never forget.

P.S. I am still going to program an application like this up, only i will use POP settings of gmail this time instead of the feed.

Geez you guys! I guess we were running tweetlater/twitter a bit too hard with all the automated tweets, since they have now shut down uploading files of tweets. Well that is unless you become a paying member. Which I’m sure the majority aren’t going to do just for uploading tweets.

I would try and make something for you guys, Especially considering I’ve been writing posts about auto tweeting and the like, only for it to fall apart days later. The only problem with this is that i don’t code in PHP. Who wants to fork out for a Microsoft server? I don’t think anyone to be honest. Which really only leaves me with a desktop version, which for many of you is just not worth it. You would need to setup each account individually, run a new instance of the application for each account, and basically leave your computer on 24/7. Yeah, i knew you didn’t like the idea from the start!

So anyone have any alternatives to tweetlater for scheduling mass tweets? Leave a comment or flick me an email at support [at] pyrogenicmedia.com

Ive been working on a few new features for Twitter Friend Adder, which include things like auto direct messages, auto tweeting, following tweeters from the homepage and a few other misc things. All today i have been on twitter off and on, checking out various things while developing all the features. And its really made me think twice about releasing ANY of the new tools.

Starting with the auto tweeter. I often go to twitter search to lookup things such as “Pyrogenic” and “Twitter Friend Adder” to see if people are tweeting about my products or this site in general. Most of the time i can just look in my web stats and see the referer, but often the referrer is just “Twitter.com”, and it wont actually tell me who tweeted the message. However today i saw this :

Sorry about the big picture. And just incase you think your eyes are decieving you, yes that is someone tweeting the same message over and over basically filling the search results with utter crap. I feel sorry for his followers.

Looking further, i find that all of those users tweets are all trying to “sell” something. Im sure im being a hypocrite here, considering i make mass friend adders, and show you guys how to automate tweets with tweetlater. But there is just something about absolutely no quality, and not intending to add quality that rubs me the wrong way. It has certainly made me think twice about releasing an auto tweeter, I dont want people to run riot tweeting marketing messages every second.

Im sure these particular users will be banned soon, and it will be onto the next account. If your even thinking of doing this, i can almost gurantee that you wont make as much as actually engaging your readers. Setup auto tweets, thats no problem. But if people are talking to you about a topic, reply to them. People are far more likely to buy from a friend.