Aside from the fact I’m not 100% sure that services like this are a good idea – I’ll save that debate for Sean Bonners post which covers some of what I’d of said – twitter is best when not used like a social network, if i stop following you, its not because we’re not “friends” any more, it could be for any number of reasons, I frequently follow and un-follow people, although I’m increasingly using tweetdeck’s grouping feature to just follow everyone – more on that another day.

I was interested to trial Qwitter as a means of seeing why followers go up and down, I had some theories I wanted to test.

The first major thing i found is that the emails you get from Qwitter come in groups, now either I keep tweeting things that make people stop following me in groups… or its grouping the qwitters  together. Judging by the tweets that people stopped following me on, its almost certainly the latter.

The second was that some user accounts were adding and removing me more than once, the majority of these were spam-like accounts, I guess hoping for an auto-follow.

There were a couple of non-spam-like accounts doing it, this was curious, the only explanation i can have is that it keeps them near the top of my followers list – meaning new users who thought “ah, I wonder who else of interest I might find on Luke’s followers list” would more likely see them.

Its vaguely useful to know who has stopped following you, as long as you remember that its not personal and that the qwitter alerts most likely aren’t on the right tweet.