PR and the Social Web

Last week I posted about the threatened demise of the best application for managing twitter follow lists, the excellent ManageTwitter.  Well after a cease and desist order it has gone…sort of.  A search for Manage Twitter will bring up a remarkably similar site called ManageFlitter, brought to you by the makers of ManageTwitter.  Apparently one of the things that the masters of the microblog didn’t like was the infringement of their trade mark.

A few other things are different too.  There is no longer a tab that allows you to bulk unfollow users whose accounts may be dormant or who don’t follow you back.  This can still be done but you have to select individual check boxes or drag and select multiple icons.   The application isn’t quite as versatile as it used to be but hopefully the changes will have satisfied the head honchos in San Francisco as this is the most useful tool around for managing your account without spending hours checking the activity of individual followers.

For the last few weeks I have been using a great application called ‘ManageTwitter’ to do exactly that for my multiple accounts.  Described by TechCrunch as a ”must-use” it is one of the most practical twitter apps available.

ManageTwitter allows you to manage your Twitter followers in a variety of ways. It informs you os all the Twitter users you follow that aren’t following you back, those that have been inactive for over a month and those that are very talkative or very quiet.  You can then unfollow these groups of users individually or in bulk and that is the issue – twitter does not approve of bulk unfollow and as of last Friday a message appeared on the ManageTwitter home page indicating that it was to close in a week because it was breaking the microblogging site’s terms of service.  Today a different message appeared:

Save ManageTwitter Thank you for all your support! We are currently in negotiations with twitter regarding the future of ManageTwitter.  Updates will be posted to our blog.

This is a genuinely useful site that doesn’t encourage or facilitate spamming.  It just might get a reprieve but doubtless with modifications to its current functionality.

New users may not be aware but established twitter users who follow large numbers of tweeters usually hit a wall when they attempt to add follow number 2001.

So, how do you get past the twitter follower limit of 2,000?  Well the only way to do it is to grow your own follower list. 

You don’t however have to have 2,000 followers; the magic number is in fact 1,819.  Twitter lets you follow the number of followers that you have plus 10%.  When you hit the figure of 1819 you are allowed to follow that number plus a further 182.  Your follower limit is now 2001 and you have broken through the barrier, just.

For every ten new followers you gain you can follow eleven new tweeters, and so on. Using that formula Ashton Kutcher would be allowed to follow over 5 million users, slightly more than the 320 currently on his radar.  So now you know.