Tell us a brief bit about yourself:I am an art blogger for Examiner.com and freelance writer.

Why did you start using twitter?
I wanted to increase traffic to my blog and meet other artists, writers, and art enthusiasts.  I also wanted to use Twitter to gauge what topics people are interested in incorporate these ideas into my blog’s content.

What was you initial impression of autotwilot?
I was initially concerned that autotwilot would make my twitter account seem too indiscriminate and bot-like. However, I was quite pleased with the efficacy of the search term tool in autopilot and was able to discover many relevant and interesting followers.

What type of user would you recommend autotwilot to?
I would recommend autotwilot to anyone who seeks to increase their network of like-minded individuals or specific target groups. Autotwilot’s strength lies in its customizable options–I can adjust how many people I want to follow, the amount of time until I unfollow those who do not follow back, and tailor my search terms to the type of people I am looking for.  In addition, autotwilot works quickly–I went from five to over three hundred followers in just over a week.  As an arts writer, I think that autotwilot can be a valuable tool to other people in creative industries.

As a final note we’ll give you one preview as to how Marisa’s stat’s performed after only 5 on autotwilot:

Update:

Since Marissa was kind enough to offer her time for our questions, we thought we’d repay the favor and link to her blog for those who might like to check out some of writings:

http://www.examiner.com/x-533-SF-Art-Examiner

Additionally we have an update of her more recent growth with the additional past three days:

First let us just say it isn’t magic, we don’t know on our own who is relevant for you, we’re trusting what you tell us on who would be relevant.  You give us some key terms and a few other variables of how rapidly you’d like to grow your followers, then it starts working. What we’ve been seeing is somewhere around a 1 day ramp up time, then a very linear grow of people following you for each day following. Take for example a few of the twitter accounts we have grown only through autotwilot, we have not personally followed more than 5 people on each of these accounts:
http://www.twitter.com/tweeptracker
http://www.twitter.com/narwhalconsult

The only unfortunate part about autotwilot is that for the time being we are completely out of invites. If you are a business user we are going to be launching some premium accounts very soon so please contact us by email and we’ll see what we can do for you. Otherwise simple reply on twitter to @autotwilot and we’ll let you know as soon as we have more invites.

First the goals for the app. Being all avid users of Twitter we first greatly enjoyed the service, but found that there were plenty of shortfalls in the features surrounding twitter’s main functionality. While there was an app that gave you a popularity rank, and an app that tells you if Jim is following Sally, we saw a shortage of functional applications that really made Twitter easier to use and manage. Our biggest hassle personally had been managing our contacts, we simply had a few scripts personally we would regularly run to cleanup and manage our followers. Additionally,  with the recent growth and popularity of twitter meant an onslaught of spammers, this made these scripts even more valuable, so we thought it would be a worthwhile exercise to launch this same type of service more publicly. Our goal is simple, make your twitter contacts manageable. 

Secondly our personal goals for the app. As a small focused consulting group, we wanted to give a quick showcase as to what we’re capable of. We took this on as something we expected to personally find useful, but also get some ramp up for other projects in some of the frameworks and api’s we would be using in the future. As a result have a pretty cool contact management app that was developed in under 40 man hours from start to finish for our initial version, as well as some very pluggable code for twitter authentication that we’ve open sourced for others to use however they wish. This piece alone would reduce our effort in recreating tweeptracker to under 20 man hours from scratch if it were being recreated. Since then of course we’ve continued adding features and performance tuning to provide a better experience. We hope others may find this as useful as we would in any future twitter apps.