Don’t worry, you’re not alone, I just unfollowed everyone from the @twitlonger account. I suppose I should start with why I followed you in the first place. When I first set up TwitLonger I automatically followed anyone who registered for an account. I had this idea that is would be a good support channel (people could DM me questions) and, to some extent, the notion that people would follow back was quite appealing as it meant news and updates could be pushed to the users of the service.
Great idea, right? Well, sort of. To stop people following a million people in an attempt to get themselves tons of followers (ie spammers), Twitter caps you to following 2000 people. Once you hit that cap you can only follow 110% of the number of people that follow you. If you have 2000 followers you can follow 2200 people. It’s a fine idea, it works well and 99% of people will never even know it exists. Everything was fine until Tweetie added TwitLonger integration and lots of people started using the service. It didn’t take long to hit that limit and the result was that, every time a new user signed up, the site was asking Twitter if @twitlonger could follow them and, most of the time, the answer was no. It was eating into processing and slowing down the site (not by much, but why do it for no reason?)
So, last week I killed that part of the code and added the “Follow @twitlonger for updates and support” message at the top of all the pages. This has been way more successful at gaining followers that the “follow them in the hope they follow you” system and means more people are likely to get updates from the site. The original idea that people could use it as a support channel by DM never really came to anything, but the amount of spam DMs I got (seriously people, don’t do those quiz sites that spam your followers with DMs) was huge, so I spent more time deleting spam DMs than I ever did providing DM support. There is already the Get Satisfaction site and email available for support and that’s where it’s going to stay now. If a standard message is sent to @twitlonger I’ll more likely than not see it and reply if needed.
So why did I unfollow everyone? Well, the DM spam was a part of it but I really believe that there’s no point in following people unless there is a two way conversation. If you’re following thousands of people there is no way to do that because there are literally dozens of messages arriving every minute, so I wasn’t getting anything out of it and neither were you. You might get something from following @twitlonger if you’re interested in service updates, but we’re not going to be having a conversation through it. So, a quick bulk unfollow later, here we are.
Don’t be offended, it’s not you, it’s me. I won’t be offended if you decide to unfollow @twitlonger (though if you use the service it is probably no bad thing to do follow, but big follower numbers just aren’t important).
There probably will be some people the account does follow, these are likely to be the awesome people that make apps that integrate TwitLonger, people that I actually am going to have an ongoing two way conversation with. All of you are special, but they’re special in a different way 