Your friends don't hate you, Twitter is just cleaning house again

If you see a sudden surge downward in the number of Twitter followers you have this afternoon, rest assured, it’s probably not something you did or said after a few drinks last night — it’s just Twitter. The micro-messaging service says it will be removing deleted and suspended accounts from users’ lists of followers at some point this afternoon.

As Twitter continues to rise in popularity, spam is becoming more of an issue. The nice thing about Twitter is that you choose who you do and don’t want to follow, but by simply requesting you as a friend, spam accounts can clutter you email inbox with friend requests (see my inbox or VentureBeat’s Eric Eldon’s) and can still message you using the @replies syntax even if you aren’t following them.

Twitter has taken steps in the past to remove spam accounts from its systems, and today it appears simply to be continuing the fight.

In related news, I’m sad that I can no longer tell which of my friends no longer like me. Qwitter, the third-party service that notifies you when someone stops following you on Twitter, doesn’t appear to be working anymore. I haven’t gotten a Qwitter notification in 16 days. I know I’ve had some really awesome tweets (Twitter messages) these past two weeks, but come on, someone had to quit me.

Feel free to follow me on Twitter here, as well as the other VentureBeatniks Eric Eldon, Dean Takahashi, Anthony Ha, Chris Morrison, Dan Kaplan and our VentureBeat account.

[photo: flickr/krisandpril]

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