HummingBird is now unavailable. I will leave this review up for a short while, then remove it.

HummingBird is hailed as a ‘Twitter Pro Tool’, and largely lives up to that title, although there are a couple of drawbacks you should know about.

In summary, it offers lots of great features which most twitter users will be happy with, but when comparing it to some of the other adders it leaves me wanting more.

Your Accounts:

HummingBird lets you add multiple Twitter accounts to automate, instead of just 1 or 2, which is always nice.

Switching between your different accounts takes just a single click, so managing all your accounts is foolproof.

Following People:

There are 3 main ways to find people to follow using Hummingbird -

1. Automatically follow everyone another user is following
2. Automatically follow everyone who is following another user
3. Automatically follow everyone who meets your search criteria.

The most interesting is definitely 3. You can choose their location, keywords in their tweets, language, hashtag, the date, and even their positive attitude. You can then follow everyone your search results find, and even leave it running overnight to follow all the new people who meet your criteria. Very clever.

Unfollowing People:

Unfollowing people who have not followed you back is super-easy too. Using Hummingbird to add new followers is great, but what you really want is for those people to follow you back. When they don’t follow you back, after a couple of days perhaps, Hummingbird can unfollow them. So you’re not following people you don’t need to be following.  Unfortunately you are not able to set a specific time delay after following someone to determine when you unfollow them. Other adders have this feature and it’s a shame not to see it with a premium program like Hummingbird.

Like all good Twitter Adders this feature comes with a VIP option, where you can add certain people to a protected list, and they will never be unfollowed.

The Bad:

Although Hummingbird is a very capable application I really don’t care much for the full browser window, watching it click click click away doing my twitter-dirty-work. Even though you can minimize it and get on with other things, it just all felt a bit weird. For one thing you are forced to load each and every page, and all usernames and profile pictures, every time Hummingbird moves on to a new page to follow or unfollow more people.  I am forced to compare this browser-window method to the silent and hidden and efficient workings of TweetAdder, and TweetAdder has my vote.

This is a difficult one, but ultimately Hummingbird doesn’t get the highest rating simply because it offers the same [or even less] features than some of the other adders and yet is still somewhat expensive.

Comparing Features some of the other adders beat Hummingbird. ‘Twitter Bird Feeder for example can skip following all people who still haven’t changed their display picture. TweetAdder keeps an eye on your follower-following ratio and let’s you know when you’re heading too high.

Conclusion:

I was left wanting more from Hummingbird, but if you are looking for a Twitter Adder that will rock the basics brilliantly, you can’t really go far wrong.

Please Note: This video quotes the old higher price. Hummingbird is $97 not $195.