That leaves an inescapable conclusion. Nobody has a million followers on Twitter. And being on the suggested user list doesn’t add value to a Twitter account, regardless of whether you’re a regular guy like me, or one of the biggest brands in the world.

So says Anil Dash on his blog post, Nobody Has A Million Twitter Followers.

Anil tackles the topic of whether a million followers translates to a million people who actually follow what you say and act upon it. He challenges that only a small percent are likely engaged.

Go read the article. He’s giving away $25 Amazon gift certificates for a suggestion on using the wealth of data he’s collected and for someone to program that solution.

Cheers,

Todd aka tojosan

Correcting follower and following counts 2 hours ago

For some time, the follower and following counts we display have been incorrect for some folks. We’re soon to push a change that will address this issue. This means that the count you see in your sidebar should match what you see on your follower and following pages.

However, a consequence of this change is that follower counts will drop for some people. In particular, those with large followings may see significant changes as we correct for spam accounts and data inconsistencies. No legitimate followings should be affected—we’re just cleaning up artifacts in the system.

– so says Twitter.

 Loading ...

I review follower notifications from Twitter every few days. From Friendfeed less often, and from Facebook, immediately. How about you.

For my own posterity: If I am following you right now and if you have applications and bots running like Qwitter, you will shortly see a message that I will unfollow you, for I’m about to pay $25 to SocialToo for the service of unfollowing all my friends. It’s your prerogative, of course, to reciprocally unfollow me. In fact, you may have services set up to unfollow your unfollowers.

Once my Twitter friend level is down to zero, I can focus on following those who provide value to me–and so I can share that value to you. Ultimately, while I remain collecting unemployment and am only part-time employed, my first priority is to use Twitter as a professional networking and collaborating tool, and second as a social chit-chat tool. On that note, here I am on Facebook.

That lengthy quote sums up one man’s take on dealing with Twitter overload.  Ari Herzog is giving up following everyone, or just about.  His strategy is sound even if it seems harsh and unforgiving.

If you’ve been an avid follower of his, and he you, you were likely notified of his recent unfollow.  This isn’t because you’re a bad person, your tweets suck, or your avatar is ugly.  It’s all about focus.

Ari is trying to bring increased value to his Twitter stream.  Some portion of that value is derived from the social aspects; “my first priority is to use Twitter as a professional networking and collaborating tool,” says Ari though.

Could I do the same? Probably not. My primary focus isn’t about earning more dollars, finding a new job, or becoming the #1 source of anything in particular.  For Ari though, this begins a reboot of his Twitter experience, and for us, those that follow him, a change in how he contributes to our stream.

Asked how he intends to keep up and know when to add people back to follow, Ari shared this:

And that my friends is sound advice for us all. You can’t follow every tweet of every person that might by some chance be relevant, but you can follow tweets that are relevant by using groups and searching. Try a Twitter client today that allows both or either.

Will you be unfollowing folks because of this? Do you think his idea is solid? Is he going to go back and end up following thousands again? What about you?

The moonwalking bird is enough to keep me hooked. Tweepular is more than dancing birds though. It’s one of the latest tools to manage your followers and those you’re following.

Bright pastel colors and graphics take this a step beyond some other tools. As well the speed appears to be significantly faster than most. Surprisingly it handled the large number of followers I have without any noticeable issue.

Key features I enjoyed:

• Large variety of sorts – last post, followers, Tweepular’s ranking and more.  All sorts go ascending or descending.
• Click and go – each individual twitterer can be clicked and the action done immediately.  The moonwalking bird pops up and when it’s done the screen is updated to remove that individual. No gross reload of the screen nor significant delay.
• Shows last updated but also when follow happened – the date of last tweet is useful, but for me knowing when they followed me was useful as well.  Interesting to find several that had followed on April 13 for example and hadn’t tweeted since.
• Oh yeah, the moonwalking bird.

It may not be the end all of Twitter follower management but for tonight it did a bang up job.

Please give it a spin at Tweepular.com.  Drop me a line and let me know if you liked it.

Todd/@tojosan