Twitter Tool Review: Your Twitter Karma

Posted on May 20, 2010 by Laura Christianson

Twitter IconIs it time to pare down the number of people you follow on Twitter?

Once a month, I use a free Web-based app called Your Twitter Karma to trim the number of people I follow.

To use the app, you must provide your Twitter username and password, but they don’t store your information.

The app takes forever to load – usually about five minutes – but once it loads, you’ll get a birds-eye view of all the people you follow, and the people who follow you (along with their avatars, if you choose to display them).

You can sort them by:

  • Last Updated (the date they most recently tweeted)
  • Ascending (A-Z)
  • Descending (Z-A)
  • Follower Count (how many followers they have)

You can show:

  • All
  • Only Following (those you follow, but who do not follow you in return)
  • Only Followers (those who follow you, but you don’t follow them)
  • All Friends (you follow them; they follow you)
  • All Followers (Everybody who follows you)
  • Mutual Friends (I’m not sure how this is different than All Friends)

So, let’s say I want to follow fewer people. I’ll filter my Karma results, showing Only Following, sorted by Last Updated.

My results show that I follow 64 people who don’t follow me back. Do I want to continue following all 64 of them? Probably not. After all, they don’t care enough to follow me back!

I scroll down the page and see that five of the people I follow haven’t tweeted in over a month. I’m going to unfollow one of them. But the other four are real-life friends, so I’ll continue following them, hoping against hope that maybe, someday, they’ll decide to tweet.

Next, I quickly scroll through the rest of the list, unfollowing any of the people whose updates I am no longer interested in.

If you have a large following, this task is going to take some time. But you’ll discover that regularly pruning your Twitter list results in more quality interactions with those you do follow.

Try it and let me know how it works for you. And while you’re at it, consider following @bloggingbistro on Twitter.

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  • http://twitter.com/1to1Discovery Juli Monroe

    Thanks much for the review! I used Your Twitter Karma to clean up my following in about half the time I think it would have taken to do it using the Twitter main page. I linked to your review and added my own observations on my blog.

  • http://bloggingbistro.com/ Laura Christianson

    Thanks for your feedback, Juli. Although Your Twitter Karma isn't a super-quick solution, it IS far less time-consuming than vetting followers directly from Twitter. Thanks for the linky love!