A month ago I couldn’t stop telling all my friends how cool Twitter was and why they should be on there but over the last 2 weeks I’ve hardly used it. Two reasons

  1. I’ve been crazy busy at work
  2. I follow a number of people who seem to have a competition regarding how many followers they can accumulate

I just spent 10 minutes removing a number of people I had on my list who have >10k followers. Some were following thousands themselves. This just started hurting my head because they generated so much @ traffic with chit chat going back and forward. I know that’s what Twitter is all about, but seriously, who can really follow thousands with real interest As for being followed by thousands there is an element of ego war going on methinks.

Worse than this though I’ve seen a few recent additions following me who when I checked them out had over 20k followers. People I’d never heard of and have no idea why they’re following me, let alone 20k other folks.

Lets take http://twitter.com/thejustinesane as an example – currently 21,280 following and 2,455 followers. This is insane. Especially given a grand total of 53 updates from this account. Clearly an attempt to turn a portion of the 21,280 “Justine” is following in to followers. I fell for it myself I’m sad to say.

My conclusion. Linkbait of a new kind….the adverts will surely follow?

Discuss….