Regardless, the tool has evolved (devolved?) into yet one more channel for marketers, and even worse, for individuals to use to support their “personal” brand. So for someone like Jeremiah — with 60k+ followers — to lament that Twitter has become diluted, strikes me as very disingenuous. Arrington, in particular: He has 25k followers, but follows 700.

If they wanted to “keep true” to the original purpose, they’d protect their tweets and only give access to people they knew.

I’m with you that we need better tools to manage what Twitter is currently delivering and possibly new tools to do more of what Twitter has allowed doing initially (continuous brainstorming sessions). But I don’t find this particularly surprising that we reach an overall ratio of 20% inception and 80% diffusion (and probably even much more on certain subjects).

There is a meme developing amongst the likes of Arrington, Scoble, and Jeremiah that says the original point of Twitter and others has become so diluted by the likes of the things you describe that some better tools and ability to manage is needed.

Follow/ unfollow is always available, but its too binary, and hardly can be described as management of the issue.

Retweeting has become a kind of sign of respect (ok, in the spirit of microblogging, micro-respect), that says “hey, I liked that tweet well enough to retweet it and pass it on to the rest of the world”. Doing that to yourself is kind of…I don’t know the right word…odd, no?

As for unfollowing, I don’t think I’d unfollow someone just for doing this. I do unfollow and then re-follow people all the time. Personally, I can’t stand minute-by-minute updates of conferences. Would prefer to read a blog post at the end of the day that summarizes what the speakers said. I’ll unfollow someone who’s live tweeting a conference, and then refollow them when the conference is over.

In some cases, people go thru streaks or phases. There’s one twitter friend who went through a phase of … [description deleted to protect his identity, since I think there's a damn good chance he'll read this] … when he get over that phase, I refollowed him.

Not sure if that happens with me or not, I don’t watch who unfollows.

As to your beef, you’re not alone. I think Twitter established rules about not giving credit where credit is due, and violating them can get an account suspended. If you find someone who’s done that to you, I hope you call him/her out on it.

I tweet from @CardAnalysis and @CCardConnection- but the explanation is simple- one contains a “Credit Union” following and one contains a “Consumer” following-

No, I am not trying to keep score or maintain any silly Twitter status- could care less about such a thing.

My response would be as a “follower”- choose one account to follow- either the Credit Union side or the Consumer side- then you won’t get duplicate tweets-

Or the other option is to simply not follow me at all if it bothers you that much- after all, it is quality of followers, not quantity-

Ondine

I was under the impression that the plural of “faux pas” was “five pas.” What’s a “pas?”

Personally, I “love” tweets that follow all the suggestions one gets from sources like Mashable. Stuff like: “Top 7 Reasons You Should Ignore My Top 3 Ways to Avoid Your Top 5 Ways to Re-tweet”