A Little Twitter Cleaning



I finally did it. I went into Twitter and cleaned out all the dead profiles. Not an easy task either – lots of clicking involved. Nonetheless, I removed over 300 profiles I was following.

In the last couple years I’ve been on Twitter, I have tried different ways to get my stuff across. For a time I sat there and followed everyone that followed me. You did gain more followers, but it really was a 2:1 ratio.

Therefore, today I decided to clean up who I was following. These were profiles I never saw pass across the twitter page. There were also dead profiles, such as pownce – the twitter clone that was sold to six-apart – and Summize – the company that was bought by Twitter.

Oh yeah. I also got rid of all the “Color War” teams I was on. Sorry Green team, but that was soo 2008…

I’ve been meaning to do this for a while. Ever since the article saying people don’t continue on with Twitter after a year made me realize that I am following profiles that are really not going to post.

Only problem is, Twitter makes it almost impossible to find those people.

This has been a problem from the start – Twitter gives you a list of who you are following and are following you, but that list is 25 people at a time with no filters. I can’t sort in an alphabetical order, I can’t sort by date joined. I have to go into each profile to find out when they last posted.

It’s really irritating when I just want to clean up my list. Especially when I start hitting limits. I can’t expect the user on the other end to actually “Close the account”. Heck – I’ve done that on a site or two, myself. When you forget about something….

After about an hour of clicking, I knocked down about 300 dead profiles or just profiles that I have no interest in. My following now matches the followed. I plan to keep it that way for a while.

I hope….

About J Powers

Podcaster, Blogger, IT Specialist. Been working in IT for over 15 years. Supported Windows 95 upon initial Launch and have worked in desktop, server and Web site support roles. Started Geekazine in 2007 and launched 5 shows from it. Speaker on many topics in Podcasting and technology. Also a musician.