Tweets from the top Twitter users.

When you’ve only got a few hundred or a few thousand followers on Twitter, the idea of having a million followers is somewhat surreal. Why would more than a million people want to follow a particular person, including Ashton Krutcher, who’s more famous for being married to Demi Moore than as an actor? According to Twittercism, there are now 25 Twitter accounts that have more than one million followers. In addition to Krutcher, the list includes Britney Spears, Oprah (who hasn’t made an update since June 6), Barack Obama, John Mayer, Jimmy Fallon and Shaq O’Neal. Chart…

There’s a lot of focus on how to get followed on Twitter but I thought it might be helpful to flip things around by providing some insight into how to get unfollowed. 1. Write about your cat, your Starbucks addiction, the weather or how cute your children are. 2. Update more than 15 to 20 times/day. Sure, Twitter is a quick and easy tool to share information and thoughts but people who get carried away are more a nuisance than a valuable resource. 3. Pound out ReTweets all day rather than doing your own updates. I would suggest the ratio for Tweets to ReTweets is 3:1 or 4:1. 4. Write…

In checking out Twitter’s new follower/following management tools earlier this week, I also noticed a small box featuring definitions for Twitter-related words. At first, they looked like part of the service but, upon closer inspection, some of them are sponsored. Here’s a couple of examples: So, it appears Twitter is playing around the idea of “sponsored definitions” (aka advertising) on its home page. For anyone interested in how Twitter is going to make money - and there are lots of us obsessed by this potential scenario - you have to wonder if “sponsored…

You’d think Twitter would have better things to do than deciding to make become a little more protection of its trademark over the word “Tweet” while promising it has “no intention of “going after the wonderful applications and services that use the word in their name when associated with Twitter”. For a company that has let its API run free and wild (and that’s been a good thing), you wonder why they would spend time focused on protecting “Tweet” as opposed to, say, creating a business model of value-added services. In any event, what I…

With little fanfare, Twitter has introduced some new wrinkles to manage the people you follow and those following you. These are nice, incremental features that probably should have been introduced long ago given they’re widely available on many third-party Twitter publishing tools. For people following, there are now easy options to mention someone, send a direct message, follow someone and block a person. For the people you’re following, it’s now easy to mention someone, or unfollow or block them.