No, I’m not saying Twitter is dead by a long shot.
But it has changed.
It has now become the playfield of a thousand cheap marketers, social media “experts” and 10,000 people who auto-follow the other 10,000 people.
Yes, we have tools like Tweetdeck and Seesmic which allows us to create lists of users. However, because Twitter does not support groups, I always feel like I don’t have portability of those lists (even though Tweetdeck allows you to save them to their server, or is it Seesmic). But in any event, I always feel like there are important Tweets being dropped by this layer on top of layer approach.
Plus my firehose is just filled with junk and noise.
So about a week ago, I decided I was gonna clean the slate and start from scratch. I would get back to zero followers. The first thing I did was ask the FriendFeed community, as using Twitter’s tools would take me forever to unfollow 900+ users.
Some of them gave me a couple of sites that allow you to do that. I didn’t feel comfortable with some of them, other just plain timed out while trying to get my followers list.
Dilip Dand said: “You could sign up for SocialToo for one-time fee of $25 and unfollow all of them in one go. :)”
“But why pay $25 dollars for something that looks so easy?” I thought.
Some of them also told me that they had tried the following approach: create a new Twitter username, delete the old one, and rename the new one to the old one.
I thought “makes sense”.
Twitter didn’t think the same.
I created @_jungleg, deleted @jungleg, and then tried renaming @_jungleg to @jungleg.
Twitter refused to do it, saying “Username has already been taken.”
I was royally screwed.
Turns out Twitter keeps closed accounts in case the user wants to reopen it (sort of what Facebook does as well). It also keeps your email on file, so if you try to register using that email account, it also says its taken.
I eventually found out that if you try to login to a deleted account, Twitter allows you to restore it. The only problem is that this account is marked as “not functional” and you will not be able to follow or be followed or both until Twitter themselves reactivates it.
And that, combined with all the other thousands of issues they have, takes a long time.
After one week of restoring the account, I’m still not able to follow users, so my following count is zero (see this video to see what happens when I try to follow someone).
Last night Robert Scoble decided to do the same. He was following 100,000+ users – and probably read about my issues ;) — so he decided to pay the $25 dollars to Jesse Stay and do it the safe way.
He is now following about 1,000 users and all those bots have unfollowed him, taking him (at the time of this writing) to 96k.
So if I’m not following you at this point, let me say sorry, but it’s not my fault. Or you are a spammer.
Have I missed Twitter? To be honest, not really. My main social point at this time is FriendFeed, and I was using Twitter to keep up with the few people who are most active in there. But because FriendFeed does let me create groups, sort, search and comb realtime, I have distance myself more and more from Twitter.
And if someone knows @jack or @ev, can you tell them I still can’t follow people?
Photo by Josh Russell
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