I’ve been so busy at work lately that I don’t have time to tweet or manually select those whom I want to follow and unfollow.  I set an auto-follow via a twitter tool that I talked about previously, Socialoomph.com.  One good thing about using this tool is that it automates the task of following those who follows me.  For me, its a courtesy gesture to follow those who follow me.  However, there are also those who are following others by the bulk to ‘jack up’ their follower list and those who are plain spammers.  So, it gets quite a bit of work when I try to weed out those who really tweets and those who are just blasting endless useless advertisements.

This morning, I searched for tools to do bulk unfollow because I have close to 1,000 followers and going through all these one by one is going to be a very time consuming task.  Here are the few that I found :-

Twitter Karma
URL : http://dossy.org/twitter/karma/

This tool shows you the whole long list of those whom you are following & whom are following you.  You will instantly know whom you are following that are not following you and vice versa.  You can tick boxes beside the names to do a bulk follow or bulk unfollow.  Oh yes, you need to key in your twitter ID and your password to get this done.  Its simple, fast & easy.

Friend or Follow
URL : http://friendorfollow.com

You only need to key in your twitter ID and they will show you a list of (1) FOLLOWING – Those whom you are following but is not following you (2) FANS – Those whom are following you but you are not following them  (3) FRIENDS – Those whom are following you and you are also following them  .  From this list, you can then click on the respective icons that brings you back to their twitter profiles and you can make a decision to follow / unfollow.  Ok, so you can’t do a bulk unfollow or follow but you have instant information on your fingertips to make a decision.

Untweeps
URL : http://www.untweeps.com/

With this tool, you can see whom has not been actively updating their tweets.  This tool allows you to specify the total days of inactivity ~ so your report is customized according to your own criteria.  They call it ‘stale tweeps’.  With the whole long list, it is by default checked so you can just click on bulk unfollow if you want to.  I had a long list, and I was thinking to myself.. if they are not updating their twitter for 30 days, I believe they have permanently abandoned it?  If you have a long list of people you are following, you’d be surprised how big this pool of inactive tweeps can be!

Buzzom
URL : http://www.buzzom.com/

Once I key in my twitter ID, it gives me an option to Flush, Grow or Reciprocate.  The idea behind it is quite similar to the rest – follow those who follow you stuff.  An interesting add on is that it has a Twitter Statistics to measure your influence, retweet efficiency, retweet rank.. etc.

JustUnfollow
URL : http://www.justunfollow.com
This tool lets your unfollow a maximum of 50 just by signing up using your Twitter id.  If you tweet their service, the limit increases by 100.  Its quite easy because it will tell you how many people are not reciprocating your follow and you can select one by one whoever you want to unfollow.
[Updated on 30 May 2010]

I used Twitter Karma, Friend or Follow and JustUnfollow to keep my list ‘clean’.

On the other hand, I’m now using Qwitter [URL: http://useqwitter.com/ ] to be notified of whoever is unfollowing me.  I just signed up for this service, whereby I only need to key in my twitter ID and email address to be notified of those who unfollow me.  I can stop the service anytime by clicking on the link that has been emailed to me.

For now, I just want to keep my Twitter list clean. :)