I can see it now, an email in my inbox reading: “Hey, why did you unfollow me? I happen to think I’m very interesting, thank you very much. Consider yourself unfollowed by me, too.”
In the ever-evolving world of Twitter apps, we now have Qwitter, with the express purpose of “catching Twitter quitters.”
The concept is very simple. You give Qwitter your Twitter username and email address, and Qwitter notifies you when someone stops following you and suggests the tweet that may have caused it.
This will work out nicely for those who’ve tried to discreetly unfollow their boss or (soon to be ex) girlfriend. Try explaining how you found her tweets highly annoying, especially because she only tweeted about her stupid cat, which you hope dies soon so you can be free of creepy staring in the bedroom.
She’ll understand, I promise.
Or doubly annoying, try this scenario: If you’re like me you get half a dozen follow notices a day (So-and-So is following you on Twitter) but your Follower count increases by a much slower rate. Why does that happen? It happens because most of those follow notices are from Twitter spammers (I call them “spitters”) trying to get you to follow them back so they can spam you.
Unless you have an auto-follow script (which I don’t recommend just for this reason), which is what the spammers are hoping for, or unless you’re one of those Twitterers who blindly follows back those who follow you—can you imagine that in the analog world, everybody following each other nowhere?—the spammers unfollow you so they don’t set off the Twitter spam alarms.
Now imagine getting half a dozen follow notices in your inbox everyday followed by half a dozen unfollow notices. Hopefully this service stays in the application arena. It’s hard to imagine a spitter wasting time with unfollow notifications, unless it’s just to annoy you. But Twitter made something like this a standard feature, it could be a real nightmare.
Can’t you see it?
Cop: Why’d you shoot him?
Catlover85: The SOB unfollowed me. But I followed him, alright. And so did my bullets.
