I’ve heard of TwitCleaner but can’t remember if I ever looked at it in detail. Will definitely take a look at it again. Thanks for the recommendation!

I never really understood the rationale for the mass unfollow. The clogging of streams argument just seemed weak to me. Any person with tens or hundreds of thousands of followers is using lists or tools to manage their streams; there’s no way around it. So, using a crowded stream as a reason for mass unfollowing seems a bit odd.

I’m with you on the boundaries. There are still spammers and others that I won’t follow. I have a great spammer now in my stream now whose bio says “interested to 10000 followers for your twitter?” The beautiful part (besides the fractured language) is that they have less than 4,000 followers!!!

Appreciate the great comment Michelle!

Bill and Adam, have you ever used Twit Cleaner at http://thetwitcleaner.com/? Ray Andrews (@SteelToad) recommended it to me a long time ago.

I love how Twit Cleaner categorizes the folks we follow into groups like Potentially Dodgy Behaviour, Not Much Interaction, etc., and provides profile pictures and links to the Twitter profiles grouped in each specific category. They make it easy to decide who to continue to follow and who to unfollow.

Twit Cleaner will also unfollow for you, and slowly, if you allow that function.

I’ll have to check Qwitter out, too.

I juxtapose their philosophy with Mark Schaefer’s, too. Mark has a LOT of fans, and his Twitter follows/followers numbers are nearly identical. Plus, he’s so doggone nice! I like nice people, and Mark is one of the nicest, isn’t he? On a human level, I respond and relate much more to people like Mark than I do to the others I mentioned. That should tell me something right there. Who do I want to be more like? Them? Or him?

After reading your post here, I’ve decided I’m going to follow your example, but with some boundaries. Like Bill, I’ll continue to check out profiles first and make sure they’re not spammers or bots. I also only want to follow back people who are using Twitter to talk to others and build relationships. I’m not interested in broadcasters who aren’t interested in anyone else, as evidenced by the absence of any @ replies or RTs in their streams.

I’ll pair all of this with much more extensive and focused use of Twitter lists so I can control the noise and clutter in my Twitter stream.

Following people back is just the right thing to do. It says, “I’m grateful for you.”

I might have believed you if you said you won 11 to 10; there’s no way we had 50+ hits!!!

I will have to check out Qwitter. I definitely have gotten a number of the follow then unfollow a few days later crowd. As for just dropping followers, I agree, and I think the rationale above covers what I think of that.

Really enjoyed yesterday also! I’ll have to send you a picture of the interstate after I left.

My strategy is similar to yours. If they show up on my doorstep I will do the cursory check and if they appear human enough I will follow back. I did however sign up w/ Qwitter which tells me who drops me. I only did this because half of the people who show up were automated generated follows and drop back off just as quickly.

For the people who think it’s cool or strategic to drop all their followers……no thank you; I’m pretty sure you will never see me buy into anything you have to say or sell………..just sayin’…………

Thanks for b’fast and conversation yesterday, it was a good day indeed.