Twitter is now aggressively moving stricter on its automation rules with the various twitter related services offering bulk following and unfollowing of users. As per Twitter’s Automation Rules and Best Practices, bulk and automated user unfollowing or following is not allowed. One by one, it is asking the twitter related service providers to fall in line with its own rules and thereby killing them. Regardless of whether twitter wants to agree or even remember, it was the thousands of similar third party twitter applications that made twitter this popular today. Now that twitter is trying to control them, it is actually destroying them.

It is not only the celebrities, but factually most people want to be heard in the world of internet. Twitter opened up the right platform for everyone – to be heard and to hear from everyone. But you need to be a well known celebrity to attract a mass following on twitter. For the rest of the mortals, there is only one way open to improve your audience and reach. Follow new people, Interact and unfollow those who are no longer interested with your tweets, from time to time.   For the newbie, Following refers to people whom you follow on twitter and followers are the twitter users that follow you.  It is a widely known fact that you gain more followers by following a lot of people and thereby many returning the favor of following you back. It is also important to clean up this following due to the limits set by twitter some time ago. Basically you cannot follow (following) more than ten percent of your  followers count.The only way to overcome this stupid limit is to manage your followers and following effectively, which means that you need to regularly clean up (read as Unfollow) your following that are no longer following you or whom you are not longer interested in following them any more.But isn’t it our personal decision to determine who we should follow or unfollow on twitter from time to time?

Twitter power users hate using twitter web ( Twitter.com) for several reasons. Twitter web is one of the slowest and most user-unfriendly websites in the whole of internet. How many times have you been sick of seeing the “fail whale message” from twitter? It is impossible from the twitter web to determine who are not following you from your following list. It is not possible from the twitter web to unfollow a set of users in one go. Who has the time to go to each twitter profile and unfollow whom we are no longer interested in? Twitter doesn’t allow you to sort your following / followers based on their last updates. I personally don’t want to unnecessarily follow someone who has stopped updating months ago. And now that twitter web doesn’t help much, it is obvious that twitter users turn to different available tools and services that aid them in their twitter strategies.

Twitter Karma was one of most popular online service that helps to determine and sort out who is following you and who is not. It also helped the user to identify those who have not reciprocated by following them back. Karma also allowed bulk unfollowing of users, especially those who are not following you or those whom you may be no longer interested. On January 15, 2010, Twitter had asked Twitter Karma to disable their Bulk Unfollow feature and they didn’t have much of a choice.

Buzzom was one another popular service that helped users to Grow (find and follow new users), Cross-follow (mass follow of following / followers of another user) and Flush (remove the users that are no longer following you) and many more. Buzzom stopped temporarily working on April 17th, 2010. If you’re using Buzzom.com then, you’ve probably receivied a message like this one: “We are facing problem with twitter authentication. Please retry after sometime”. That’s because Twitter temporarily disallowed Buzzom to connect because of  the “breach” of Twitter’s Terms of Service.  Now after being asked by twitter, you cannot follow or Unfollow 50 users automatically at once and twitter allowed them to continue their services now. You will be shown the list of 50 people but now you would have to individually follow or unfollow them on Buzzom.

The latest to fall under the radar of “Big Brother” Twitter is another application named Manage Twitter , also primarily used for mass unfollowing.  On April 22, MT also informed via its blog that Twitter has sent the service an email letting them know that they’re breaking one of their rules.

ManageTwitter promptly replies to twitter and its users “Yes our application does facilitate bulk unfollowing BUT ManageTwitter does not facilitate any *automated* bulk unfollowing, the user has to filter based on criteria. The user is still required to do significant processing to unfollow groups of people. Furthermore the system only allows unfollowing of up to only 100 at a time.”

MT claims to have unfollowed nearly 6 million people for the over 35000 users who have used their services.

MT justifies their services by saying that

“But surely a service such as ManageTwitter.com that ENHANCES the Twitter user experience is adding value to the Twitter ecosystem? Over time a Twitter account can get “bloated” – accounts that you follow can become inactive, accounts that you thought would be interesting become stale, accounts that you followed can overtweet cluttering your stream and so on. Managing your followers and people that you follow can easily become a chore. We developed Managetwitter.com to assist users prune and clean their twitter account with the aim that the user will engage MORE with their own Twitter account.”

Unlike TwitterKarma and Buzzom , ManageTwitter is putting up a brave fight to save its services and also requests Twitter to reconsider its decision. They have also called for help and support from its own users and fans.

In a game where Twitter still holds the strings, let us see who will eventually win!