It is the hottest trending topic on Twitter and one that has spawned countless blog posts between those taken by Dundonian teenager, James Cunningham’s simple, snappy Twifficiency idea and others irked by the “spam” it generates.

So which camp is right? The Drum spoke to Garry Byrne, divisional head of strategy at Reading Room to find out if the new service is efficient, or deficient.

The primary bugbear that people have with the service are the anodyne messages it clogs up feeds with but Byrne observes: “Lots of fuss has been made about Twifficiency, and how it’s “spamming” user’s accounts. In fact, all it’s actually doing it reposting the results of an application you chose to use to your Twitter feed (interestingly, the backlash from this has been so much that the application’s creator has now added an option to NOT post the results to your feed).”

A secondary consideration is privacy but Byrne believes this to be a red herring: “Are there any privacy concerns? Some – you’re giving the application access to everything you’ve posted on Twitter, but then that’s no more than every other app you’ve ever authorised has, and let’s face it – anything you post on Twitter is in the public domain already.

“This is no more or less of a security or privacy risk than any other application, and our only real problem with it is that as more of the people we’re following work out their Twifficiency, our timelines get filled with arbitrary information that we *really* don’t care about, rather than the occasional ramblings about egg butties for breakfast that we’re merely slightly bored of.”