I didn’t followed you, you add me, may I ask you why you add me and how you found me? (Just curious)

Thanks, have a nice christmas time!

The first 30 days on twitter had me deluged in junk. DMs went unanswered. Tweeps went unanswered. There was nobody home and I was still looking at their garbage.

I did go through and delete those folks. Life is much better now. I simply refuse to validate their conduct on twitter. That seems to me to be positive for twitter.

And, I’ll bet, MOST of the “people” following you are garbage anyway. More than likely you’ve used some tool that promised to get you followers. It’s just a sort of giant pyramid scheme and means next to nothing.

Having only a few people that you follow and lots of followers does make you a sort of celebrity; but probably because you actually have something interesting to say. Twitter isn’t as much about having a conversation with everybody that follows you as it is about having conversations with people who add value to your life.

You can’t rely on DMs, because they won’t go thru if you aren’t following them. So you are left with @replies.

There are enough great third-party desktop apps out there that allow you to do some real filtering (I use and love Seesmic Desktop), and if you’re a digital citizen, you are probably the type that has great inherent self-filtering going on anyway.

Unfollowing also says “There is nothing I can learn from you” which implies you know it all.

Don’t do it. Twitter is a community. Not just you sitting like a guru on the mountaintop waiting for people to come to you.

Here is the biggest problem with what you just said. Now everyone you unfollowed will be seeing your tweets but you won’t be seeing theirs. Of course not everyone one of them is going to unfollow you but you would not have that number of followers in the first place if you had not first followed them. (they reciprocated.) So now you will be sending your message (tweets) to them but you will not be seeing theirs. Saying they are welcome to unfollow you is not good enough. If you have thousands of followers you know good and well they aren’t all going to unfollow you.

If you mean what you say about wanting to truly start over then how about closing your twitter account and starting from zero. That would be starting over. Unfollowing everyone you ever follower and then following only a select few is not starting over.

This way you will be sending one way signals into the twittersphere.

Each to his own, but this is not cool in my opinion.

I’ll have to write a whole long post about why I did it and what the outcome has been for me, but the short of it is this – if Twitter is really about interaction for you and not numbers, unfollowing everyone is great.

Sure, it’s easy to get to 80,000 + followers by following 80,000 + people. Why? Because most people auto follow back.

But, what I found is that when my numbers started to get really big, I wasn’t really interacting with anyone, my DM box became another spam box full of junk, and my tweet stream became a distraction.

Now that I’ve unfollowed everyone and begun again, I’ve connected personally with just about everyone I’m following. If I haven’t, I hope to at some point. My DM box is empty other than hearing from people I want to hear from. And, my tweet stream is full of people I know, like and trust.

If anyone I was following wants me to follow them back, I invite them to have a conversation with me. Let’s get to know each other. Otherwise, what’s the point?

@alexisneely