Seriously, I think my comment was catalysed by Twitter having failed to deliver new-follower notifications for a few days, then dumping a couple of dozen in my inbox. That’s two dozen times I need to open a mail, click a link, assess whether I want to follow this person. I’m happy to do that for genuine people — almost all of my 500-odd followers came to me first — but I became increasingly irritated as one after another presented with a couple of updates, following thousands, followed by relatively few in return.

Charles Miller has thoughts on the issue: http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2008/04/11/twitterpated

@John Yeah, I just need something so I can keep up with the recent ones. The criteria thing might be a bit cold and analytical for my tastes, but might be a useful tool if thresholds were set low enough.

@David R. Thanks!

@Dan Great minds think alike! ;-)

I read one more post on this today, via AdRants, Ryan Kuder called Seth Godin to task for steering people to Twitter but not using it himself. One of Kuder’s commenters, Ben Kunz, had this to say:

“Having said that, I think use of Twitter should be in or out — either be real and genuine and personal and put up with the overload spray of microhyperblogger telepathy, or avoid it. Using it solely to push PR about blog posts or books feels plain wrong.”

My thoughts exactly. Either participate meaningfully (even on a small scale) or get out. It’s a tool for communities, not tool for straight-up marketing.

http://www.wildlyappropriate.com/article/336/i-just-got-tweeted-by-a-marketer

Also, it would be helpful to be able to keep track of the followers you have deliberately decided not to block and not to follow so that you don’t have to reconsider every time you go through your list. OH! I guess that is why you only want the list to include recents. The problem, though, will be that obnoxiously persistent icky followers might unfollow and follow repeatedly to get back on your list of recents.