We all know that spam is bad and nobody wants it but what might just be possibly worse than spam in your twitter stream are twitterers using certain tools that are bound to annoy their followers. I’ve used some of these myself, for which I apologise. You see, few people actually set out to annoy their followers, what usually happens is that they come across a new tool and think, ‘that looks good, let’s try it out’. In some cases the tool is good, for the user, in some cases it’s not. If it’s not good for the user, it’s not surprising that they stop using it. It’s those tools that look good for the user but are not good for their followers, those are the awkward ones – the annoying ones. So here I give you a list of the top five annoying twitter tools … 1. Scoop.it I put this at the top as it’s probably the newest of all the tools in the list. Like some of the others, it’s an aggregating tool that collects items on a common theme and presents them fancifully for the user. The problem comes when one of the articles is tweeted, the followers see a tweet with a link, supposedly to the article but it turns out to be a pop out window of just the title and pic of the article; it is this that annoys the followers. Why not just give your followers a link to the article? 2. Deck.ly This one is reallllly annoying! Tweets are limited to 140characters and that seems to work well. What Deck.ly does is to extend the tweet, so if you are too lazy to rephrase your tweetif it’s too long, don’t worry, Deck.ly will come to your rescue. It will tweet the first 140 characters of your tweet including a link. Your followers can click on the link and be taken to your long tweet. The trouble is, the link takes you out of twitter and the twitter stream; that annoys your followers. 3. Paper.li This is another aggregator tool and, in my opinion, one of the best. It simply presents interesting items in your twitter stream as if they were articles in a newspaper. You can then catch up by reading them later, rather than missing them. Nice. The problem comes when a user switches on the tools auto tweet function. This then announces to all followers when paper.li publishes a newspaper. Sometimes this can be interesting for some followers but often it is only of interest to the user, so why use auto tweet? Turn it off! 4. 4sq and other check in services. Okay, 4sq can be fun and sometimes it can be useful to tweet where you are, particularly if your friends are looking to meet with you. Most the time though, there is no need to tweet your checkins, they are rarely of interest to your followers; so turn off auto tweet and only tweet checkins when useful or if your add a tip to your checkin. 5. Almost anything that auto tweets. In my case the local paper does this an awful lot so does edugeek and it does get annoying. Very often, auto tweeters will tweet up to a dozen tweets all in one go and they’re hardly likely to respond if you reply to any of them. Be warned, some auto tweeters pose as people, making you believe the tweet has come from an actual person. I don’t know why they do it or what they get out of it but I do wish they’d stop. Of course, I hear you say, one can always stop following, and that is good advice but sometimes, just sometimes the auto tweeters have good content, you just wish they’d tweet it properly! So there you are, 5 twitter tools that annoy your followers, well they annoy me anyway and I dare say you can think of other tools that annoy you.