Why Twitter Followers Qwit

Just today, the Qwitter service told me that 11 of my twitter followers had stopped following my tweets overnight. I must admit seeing such a cluster of qwitters was quite a shock. Luckily, thirteen more tweeps had started following me over the same period.

Qwitter lets you know at what point people some following, i.e. after which tweet you lost them. It doesn’t necessarily mean it was the specific tweet, there are a whole host of other reasons. In fact, if Qwitter simply pings and compares your followers list on a specific time cycle then if it catches a bunch of qwitters who have left it will tag the same tweet for all of them, which is annoying and betrays just how useless it is to worry about indivdual tweets.

Just out of interesting, according to Qwitter those 11 abandoned me after I replied to @tim_yates.

I’d tweeted a link highlighting how in the UK it is illegal to scrape or otherwise sample a person’s DNA without permission. Tim pointed out how crazy it is for such a crime as DNA theft to exist given that the authorities can store your genetic material in perpetuity.

My response was that: “Yes, we’re a nation of legal contradictions, the law is indeed an ass.”

The “law is an ass”, it’s a common enough English idiom and refers to both the stubbornness and stupidity of the donkey-like animal as opposed to what an American might understand the word ass to mean. In British English that would be arse.

So, was my having tweeted that the law is an ass, the real reason those 11 (pity it hadn’t been 12 for a full jury) qwitted my tweets? It’s hard to tell. @altepper was the first to abandon me. I must admit, I’d not engaged much with this guy, he was a follower of a friend who is still following me as far as I recall, so nice knowing you altepper but bye bye.

The next qwitter was @Realtrix. This guy listed no bio on twitter and has a very blurry photograph. But, more to the point he seems to have a disproportionately small number of followers but a large number of people whom he follows. I should’ve spotted that issue when I first followed him. It’s often a sign that a tweep isn’t likely to be engaged much with their followers. Moreover, if his ratio had been just a little bit higher, I’d have assumed he was a spammer, or at best an affiliate marketer. So, au revoir Realtrix.

@mikegermano was next to qwit on exactly the same “law is an ass” tweet. Mike looks like a go-getter ex-politician now running a new media agency. I suspect he and I simply didn’t overlap on tweet content for some reason, although he may have been offended my legal idiom. Who knows? Auf wiedersehn Mike.

Then there was Natalie Brown, a Canadian singer songwriter who does “sweet soul and RnB meets catchy pop”> not my cup of tea, I’m afraid, and I never followed her so I don’t blame her for unfollowing me. Ciao, bella!

The self-styled “King of new media”, madmain was next to qwit my tweets. He’s a “advertiser, badvertiser, cadvertiser, dadvertiser and fadvertiser” apparently, and into karaoke and has several thousands of followers, I was never one of them, so I suspect his auto-unfollow ditched me.

@Surion barely touched the sides, with only a handful of friends and followers and posts often in a tongue foreign to me, I never did follow him, poor guy, now he’s one followee down. Sayonara Surion.

@launchlab is a business newsletter, covering areas on which I rarely write so I never did subscribe to their point of view and they’ve duly unfollowed me (presumably using an unfollow script).

I don’t remember seeing Carmen Holotescu follow me, so I never did check out her bio and tweets with the intention of following her back. Shame. Her stuff looks interesting. The same goes for d_rey who seems to have a claim on working for technorati.com…hmmm… La revedere guys.

Linc4Justice is heavy on the following, low on the followers and seems to reply to tweets almost exclusively rather than tweeting new ideas, thoughts, or links. I guess we were never going to make it. Seeya.

Finally, BookPage adds a footnote.

To all my twitter followers who became my twitter unfollowers:

So long, farewell, auf wiedersehn, a dieu, to yieu and yieu and yieu and yieu and yieu. Y’all come back now.

Oh by the way, OutsideMyBrain had the brilliant idea of writing an Ode to the Followers, the fabulous fifteen tweeps who followed me while the infamous eleven were abandoning me…watch out for that on Sciencetext soon!