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Are you a fan of the same people? (Pic: wvs on flickr)

Unlike the people who apparently follow thousands publicly on Twitter, and then have a second account to follow the people they actually listen to, I only have the one main Twitter account.

And until today, I proudly stated that I’d only ever unfollowed two people – but following 1970+ was beginning to stretch even my Twitter Addiction Disorder.

So I thought I’d do a quick check, via Twitter Karma.

In the end, I reduced my Following figure by about 30 or so. Not major, but I don’t think I can realistically go over 2000 for the time being and still interact with a reasonable percentage of people – so it frees up 30 more follows for people.

The criteria for unfollowing was a combination of:

If the account hadn’t been updated in over 100 days.
If it was someone spammy I’d mistakenly let through.
If it was someone whose interests etc were completely unrelated to mine, their blog didn’t help, and I’d never interacted with them in any way.
Or if it was a fake account or a discontinued service.

What surprised me was the amount of followers for accounts that hadn’t been updated in a year, or for discontinued services.

I wonder how many people are following dead accounts, or those that have since been revealed to be fake, or changed purpose.

So do you ever review who you’re following?

Just a theory, but could it be that the business side of the industry, in control of the finance, business strategy, distribution etc could be worried about letting the inmates take over the asylum?

After all, the creators – the writers, directors,musicians etc seem to have had a rough idea about leading a tribe of passionate people all along.

You may or may not like the films of Kevin Smith, for example, but he knows his audience – he makes films that are comparaitvely cheap to produce, always turn a profit, and generally featured the same characters – in fact his only real failing was with an attempt to go mass market, after which he went back to making films for ‘his’ people.

And he’s not scared to get out and talk to people – averaging 3.63 posts per day on his own message board since May 2004 makes a total of 6082 posts.

Add him to the list that includes Radiohead, Trent Reznor, Cory Doctorow, Neil Gaiman, Joss Whedon etc. All supported by groups who put the fan into fanatical.

Who else can we add?