Regular readers know that OrangeJackass opted out of GDI, stopped actively pursuing Twitter Reciprocal Following scripts and recognizes that nobody is listening to our tweets.

It’s quite amusing to see followers continuing to pour in.

So, in true entrepreneurial fashion, we concocted a potion that we intend to sell. For a limited time, though, we’ll share our Twappuccino recipe right here, for free! Tell your friends! (Apologies to Diane Philips)

Turns out, some other folks have been talking about #twappuccino. Check it out, if you are bored.

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OrangeJackass has been ranting about Twitter Reciprocal Following for a while. So it was interesting to see a tweet about a blog post from Robert Scoble:

You are SO unfollowed!

Robert gives some valid, commonsense reasons for his actions and points out a gem of a tool.

If you’re not using FriendFeed, here is a snippet from the comments that might help you to reconsider:

Gary Arndt
Are you going to cut back on your FriendFeed followers as well? If not, why?
Scobleizer
No, because FriendFeed lets me put them into lists. I can separate out my favorite people from the rest via a list. This is something that Twitter can not do (many Twitter clients like PeopleBrowsr, TweetDeck, and Seesmic can, but not at a deep level like FriendFeed can).

Now, even though we generally think that Twitter Reciprocal Following is Stupid, we think that it is a great way to get blog fodder. We won’t kid ourselves about how many people are paying attention to us* and we simply plan to move forward with other forms of publicity:

• Forum signature
• Commenting on blogs
• Article Marketing

* As of August 8, 2009, that @OrangeJackAss screenshot is still accurate!

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Nobody wants to hear your sales pitch. Maybe.*

For sure, nobody wants to be spammed with irrelevant tweets.

OrangeJackass recently launched the domain, blog and twitter account to experiment with different Internet technologies, including marketing.

We noticed the proliferation of Twitter Reciprocal Following websites and decided to give them a try.

On July 18th, 2009, we created a Twitter account. We immediately opted in to TopFollowed.com, TwitProQuo.com and ExtraFollowers.com. We reviewed VipFollowers.com and determined that it was a clone of ExtraFollowers.com, so we skipped that one.

From a technological perspective, these web services deliver mostly as promised.

From an ethical perspective, there are some serious issues:

• We’re not sure whether FollowersPlus is related to VipFollowers and ExtraFollowers, but the owners used our account to post false advertising.
• One of these services changed our Twitter password and continued to spam our statuses (tweets).

Naturally, good marketing hardly follows unethical practices. However, let us be clear:

Even if a service is on the up and up (we have no complaints with Twit Pro Quo or TopFollowed) – there is no point in following thousands of accounts or having thousands of followers if few of them actually want to talk to you!

The only responses we have received from following accounts through the Twitter Reciprocal Following services are the automated direct messages that accounts send when they receive a new follower.

Twit Pro Quo did send one message in the two weeks that we’ve been opted in:

Summary: Twitter Reciprocal Following is Stupid!

* OrangeJackass actually wants to discover new pitches, so we can help our readers separate the Sweet Ideas from the Stupid Ideas…

We are currently evaluating GDI Twitter Secrets, as a result of following @VDelMonte. So, if this system turns out to be a Sweet Idea, we’ll remember whom to thank

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