Almost everyone out there is into Social Networking, at least on some level, these days. The 2 most popular services being Facebook and Twitter. Over the past year or so, I’ve drifted away from Facebook, where my real friends post about what’s going on in their daily lives, in favor of spending the majority of my downtime perusing the tweets of people I follow on Twitter. I’ll spend a bit of time reading the casual musings of cyber-friends, but more often, searching out information on technology, graphic design and web development. It has become an integral part of my daily quest to learn more about the field that I work in. I also sort the people I follow into specific lists – Twitter lets each user keep up to 20 lists. I have lists such as Hawkeyes, WordPress and A List (I need to clean up my A List), which allow me to quickly hop from one topic to the next, eavesdropping on the topic of the day. If I’d find someone who was interesting or knowledgable, I’d follow them on Twitter while I was working during the day and then check up on them at night.
This worked great until today…Twitter told me I was following too many people. Turns out that Twitter can limit the number of people you can follow to 2,000 – based upon the ratio of people who are following you. Ashton Kutcher could probably get away with following several million people – he’s got over 6-million followers. My legion of 941 followers puts me in a spot where I’m going to need to, a. get more followers, and b. go Ginsu on the people I followed at one time, but have since lost interest in.
I’d been on Twitter for 742 days, according to When Did You Join Twitter?, and it was time to weed out, or in this case tweet out, a few people and companies I follow on Twitter – as far as I could see, there was no easy way to do this from directly within Twitter. A Google search pointed me to a site called My Tweeple, a web-based tool for managing your Twitter friends and followers.
This was the solution. I connected My Tweeple to my Twitter account and it pulled in all of the people I followed. I wanted to keep the people I’ve recently followed and My Tweeple allows you to sort Earliest to Latest, so I could take a trip back in time and see the first people I ever followed. I did a quick search of the terms “Social Media” and eliminated a good portion of the people whose primary area of expertise was “How to get 10,000 Followers on Twitter”…maybe I should have kept those people.
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