Could Twitter.com get any worse? OMG. If it's not up, it's spambot-seeking bots are killing my followers. I keep TweetDeck up in the background all day at work. I follow some folks on Twitter, some people follow me. They are my tribe, as they're called, and I love them because they resonate with me. The beauty of the Twitter.com idea is that I can choose those with whom I resonate spiritually, economically, politically, socially, gastronomically, whatever-ically. Get it? I choose. Nobody chooses my tribe for me.

Now, if in choosing, I have some malfeasance in mind, say harvesting profile data and building spam campaigns against a large group of Twitters, I should probably be stopped. A low ratio of followers to followees (those whom I am following) might be one way to identify people with no legitimate motive in the space. Another might be to look at the number of times someone has been blocked by other Twitters, essentially taking the community's vote of confidence into account when deciding who the real spammers are. Still another might be to look at the ratio of followees to tweet volume. In other words, an evil harvester is likely to be watching many, followed by few and contributing very little conversation. There are many algorithms I could cook up that would accurately find the creeps and stop them while leaving the innocents alone.

So, today, I log in to Twitter.com via TweetDeck and see that half of my followers and half of my followees are gone. Months of work building relationships through my friends and their friends just gone. This happened to millions of Twitters, not just me. Massive social energy vanished in the blink of an eye. Really normal, healthy people like Rachel Appel and Kevin Griffin who followed me because we resonated with one another, are now told by Twitter.com, "No, you are not following Kevin Hazzard any longer because who knows why? We just felt like making this change. Have a nice day." Rachel Appel, Kevin Griffin and I don't have any qualities which would make us stand out as potentially malicious. But Rachel lost 36 of her followers. And, Kevin Griffin, who just got started with Twitter.com lost 75% of his followers. I lost 38 of mine, almost half. Poor Ted Neward, whom I follow(ed) because I have great respect for him, went from 243 followers to zero. That's right, Twitter.com thinks it's better for all 243 of us who respect Ted not to hear what he has to say.

And I was already diligent about blocking spambot and fembot followers common to social networks like Twitter.com. To have 79 legitimate followers on July 23rd, 2008, I had already blocked more than 20 spambot followers over the previous few months. This morning, Twitter's own spambot-seeking bots reduced my followers from 79 to 41, cutting out Rachel and Kevin and many others. And Jeff Bezos is investing his hard-earned money in this piece of junk? I suppose he's not as smart as I thought he was. Sorry. I shouldn't say that about Jeff because I don't know him. He must be brilliant. But someone needs to take those Twitter bozos by the scruff of the neck and give them a good shaking. Maybe that's what Jeff Bezos will do. I hope so.

By the way, I was able to recover my followers because TweetDeck, my Twitter client of choice, caches my tribe over time. After Twitter cut my followers, I got a very accurate rendering of my former tribe by clicking the GROUP button in TweetDeck. Twitter had lost them but TweetDeck remembered them. Victory! I added my followers back manually because in Twitter.com's official response to the problem, they claim that some of the losses will never be fully recovered. While my followees have been restored, my followers will have to rediscover me on their own. That will take months.

If you want to see how many followers you or your friends lost today, check out TwitterCounter and type in your screen name in the search field.