It's been a few months since I started editing my follower lists with a hard blade. I was just cresting over 7,000 followers when I began massive unfollows, or layoffs as I like to call them.
I used TwitBlock first to begin weeding the people from my Friend-stream. (Folks that I was following.) And just a few days ago I used a tool, that seemed to be FREE, called TheTwitCleaner. The first run gave me a list of over 1,000 people that I should consider unfollowing. Various criteria were used to calculate the spammy tweeters, and I had to do a lot of deslecting of peeps I wanted to keep tracking. When I finally got the list down to about 520 people, I paid, gladly, five dollars to have Mr. TwitCleaner do the work for me. Turns out he accidentally unfollowed all 1,000 people, but when I contacted him, he fixed me all up again.
I haven't been back to Twitblock for a while. But while I'm at it, might as well do a quick run and purge.
Here's the typical report back from TwitBlock:
I think it's pretty easy to see that #1, #2 and #4 are spammers. I'll have to analyze ScottMarcaccio and vbiShow. But I'm pretty sure I don't follow any "show"s.
So for today I am a bit lighter in my follower count and a ton lighter in my friends. If I could just get Tweetdeck on my Blackberry I'd be a happy tweeter.
Please, for 2010 vow to watch what you tweet and mind the spam. Together we can clean the stream and "report and block" the baddies. Let's all be better tweeters in 2010.
@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/twitter-2010
Additional Twitter-related Posts:
- Twitter and WordPress Move In Together: WordPress Unlocks a Twitter API
- Oh Twitter: What Have I Done to Deserve This? And What is a Twitter LIST?
- Unfollow Friday: Sparking Anger and Dropping Followers Like Flies
- I Feel Better and Look Great! Twitter Spam Attack
- Twitter Steps Up the Spammer Reporting with a New Action
