I've been playing around with the Twitter API and some of the more popular Twitter clients. My favorite desktop client for Twitter is TweetDeck. But one feature I really would like to have is a view of the relationships between my friends and followers. I want to see something like this:

I thought if I could manufacture that sort of diagram where the people in each part were clickable, I would be able to see and manage the relationships in my "tribe" more clearly. Tonight, taking a break from work coding, I created a desktop application that isn't as pretty but does what I want. It's called Follow Me Follow You and it looks like this:

OK, I warned you it wasn't pretty. But it is pretty cool. You can see the three parts of the Venn Diagram shown above as listboxes on the left side. The left side and right side are independent except that if you click on the screen name of a user on the left, it loads that user's Twitter page in the browser on the right. That feature alone is nice. Having persistent access to your tribe in a directory format is handier than I thought it would be. I can see part of a conversation in the browser window and hop around to related parties without having to use Summize, aka the Twitter search engine.

I can also scan the lists to find out other interesting information. For example, in the "Followers not Friended" list, I can scan for new names that I may have missed in e-mails that Twitter.com sends to me when someone starts following me. After clicking on their name and logging in within the web browser on the right side, I can look at their timeline and decide whether or not to follow them from there.

I used my new Mingle.NET library, a social networking library for the .NET Framework, to build the new tool in about an hour. I haven't released Mingle.NET or the Follow Me Follow You tool. If you're interested in them, let me know and I'll get them ready for production. I can only work on them in my spare time and there isn't much of that these days. :)