A Rating for Popular Twitter Apps I: Searching for Tweeters To Follow
Editor’s Note (2026): This post is from ~2009, when Yu-kai was working as a Twitter consultant. Most of the apps reviewed here no longer exist. Twitter itself has been rebranded to X (formerly Twitter). This post is preserved as a snapshot of the early social media tool ecosystem.
(Discovery tools make life easier)
So since I’m being paid as a Twitter Consultant right now, I’m doing some research regarding all the Popular Twitter Apps out there. I thought since I’m doing the work anyway, I might as well share some knowledge to my readers. It’s somewhat brief, but since there are so many I do not want to type out an elaborated report for each of them. If you want to know more, you gotta ask me :) (Note: this is strictly my own opinion based on my experience and analysis.)
This is the first post about the Twitter Apps I checkout regarding how to find Tweeples to follow. Hope this helps!
Table of Contents
Author Credibility: Yu-kai Chou
Yu-kai Chou created the Octalysis Framework after studying gamification since 2003 — years before the term entered mainstream vocabulary. As a Human-Systems Architect & Behavioral Designer, his framework has been applied by LEGO, Microsoft, Porsche, Coca-Cola, Salesforce, and MrBeast, impacting over 1.5 Billion Users.
Chou has taught the Octalysis methodology at Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Tesla, Google, BCG, and IDEO.
His work has been cited by Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, Wired, US Department of Energy, NIST, NSF, NCBI, US Department of Education, ClinicalTrials.gov, and Google Scholar — with 3,700+ more academic publications. Explore his books here.
App Ratings
Twits like Me (Find out people like you): Not particularly good. Couldn’t find relevant people to me. 3/10
Twellow (A Twitter directory sorted by occupation): Excellent. Fast, gets the people you want ranked by followers, and shows all relevant data. 9/10
Just Tweet It (A twitter directory sorted by interest): Decent. A bit unfriendly. 7/10
Twubble (Automatically finds people who are compatible with your interests): Quite good. Fast and easy. Shows you who do people you respect follow. Doesn’t tell you details of person though. 7/10
Mr Tweet (Finds worthy followers that you are not following, and influences beyond your network): Excellent. Like Twubble but better and shows more info, including Tweet Frequency, Ratio, and Behavior(!). 9/10
Twittie Me (Creates a twitter ad for you on front page and allows you to find others): Not that good. Hassle to use. 3/10
Twitdir (Search for words in usernames, locations or descriptions): Quite complete. VERY slow. Average. 6/10
Twitter Grader Search (Search for top Tweeters with certain keywords): Excellent too. Fast and shows you the top Tweeters regarding each topic. Limited to top people. 8/10
TwitStat (looks at your tweeting behavior): Interesting App, as it can find the “most social” “happiest” “most tired” “most responded” people in the last 14 days. The interface is not well built, and you can’t really get much of the info of the people. Interesting but not that great. 6/10
Related Reading
- The Octalysis Framework
- 5 Dominant Social Media Marketing Techniques
- How to Build an Effective Content Calendar for Twitter
- How to Use Twitter Clients
- Books by Yu-kai Chou