Twitter Dump

Twitter users will find this story interesting:

Feeling overwhelmed by Twitter? You’re not alone…although you probably aren’t trying to follow messages from over 100,000 people. Social media addict Robert Scoble was, and decided to unfollow them all at once.

Scoble’s situation is somewhat unique. Until recently, he was auto-following everyone who followed him, a practice that was accepted in Twitter’s early days but eventually led to a lot more spam in the system (users could set up spam accounts to follow people knowing some accounts would auto-follow them back). For Scoble, this led to a situation where he was following over 100,000 people, most of whom he didn’t know. Worse, some were spam accounts that filled his Twitter DM inbox with junk.

Twitter doesn’t allow you to mass unfollow natively, so Scoble had an automated script written to do it for him. He writes of the experience:

On Monday I unfollowed 106,000 people on Twitter. The reaction so far has been quite interesting. More than 7,000 accounts have unfollowed me back. They did that so fast that I assume they are just bots that are looking to increase their follower numbers. I knew I’d lose them, but that’s sort of why I did it. People who are following me just to get another count on their follower numbers are just plain, well, lame.

But it’s worse than that. When I unfollowed everyone all my spam just stopped. Dead. No more spam. Not since Monday. Twitter is actually quite enjoyable. Not a single DM spam. Not a single piece of spam has come through the home page.

I wrote about my Twitter philosophy back in June and it lines up pretty well with Mr. Scoble's new outlook on the service. I only follow 53 users and each of them are there because they provide me with information I want. I won't follow anybody whose updates would not be something I'd want to read all the time.

I get new followers everyday, but my numbers don't go up much because older followers drop off after I don't follow them back. Some folks are clearly just looking to build up their numbers. I don't believe they really care what I have to say, so if they leave, no problem.

I've also seen an increase in the number of porn spam followers that have shown up recently. It seems like porn is always one of the first ways a new technology is exploited. I check out every new follower and probably 10 times lately the profile of the new follower consisted of one posting which said something like "Check out my naked pictures!!!!" or something similar. Those folks are quickly blocked (and no, I don't check out their naked pictures).

A couple of weeks ago my followers dropped 30 overnight after Twitter did a mass cancellation of spam accounts. Again, no problem. Glad to get rid of them.

Twitter's a fun little tool. It's nice to use when I'm running around because it automatically updates my Facebook status and I can let a whole bunch of people know what's going on with quick cellphone text message. If you're on Twitter and would like to follow along, click here.