Also funny, I have been followed by exactly zero new twits since I sent the "Viagra" tweet. Even the one twit that followed me one min later removed themselves.

I might be on to something here... :D

Mine are and I still get one or two spam followers a month.

My current issue with Twitter is the people I really do want to follow but that also about half their tweets are just retweets. Once in a while is fine to alert me to someone I might want to follow but after that I grow annoyed.

Does anybody know if a tool that filters out retweets?

I do have a second account that is public and it is amazing how any tweet seems to draw a half dozen marketing twitter account followings. Mentioned Providence once and got three different Providence night clubs following me.

They would seem to be. I did a search for "lunner" and a number of results came up but nothing from her.

Ah, I was confusing "blocked" with "private".


Speaking of which - I went private so I can be absolutely sure that I can be honest and real without compromising my job and family relations. But I do feel like I'm missing out on the very public side of it. My hashtags are pointless. If I'm following someone and they aren't following me (celebrities) I can't respond to them. If people are searching for info on something, I'm of no help.

And now there are possibilities like this one. Sigh. Unless Twitter adopts a per-message privacy setting, I just won't be able to participate in the next step of net evolution.

Open two accounts and use one for public activities and one for more private with a select list of people allowed to read. A hassle, sure (my phone twitter app handles multiple accounts pretty well since it can keep multiple instances open at the same time) but would allow you a venue for saying "Head Librarian Bob Jones can go blow himself" as well as "Oh, @Wil, you're so dreamy and geeky!"

Yeah, I could do that, but just considering it gives me a headache. Already I have a distinction between Twitter and Facebook, as FB includes family and acquaintances and has my real name attached....which means I post very little there. I know I would just use the "real me" one and not have enough energy for the "public me" one. Plus, would my friends have to follow both, or do I have to cross post everything "public"? Wouldn't demanding that my friends follow both seem douchebaggy?

Perhaps a good app would make me feel better about it. Next phone, perhaps.

Do you follow any celebrities? Because I follow a couple: Lily Allen, Grant Imihara, etc. That might be the reason I get more spam followers.

Demanding they do certainly would be douchebagery. Simply saying "some topics I'll discuss under this name, some under this one, follow if you'd like" isn't really. Any more than it is douchebagery for you to post some things on Twitter and somethings on Facebook and some things on LoT. It isn't like following two accounts for creates some great Twitter burden for them.

As for the pain in the butt of separating your speaking between two accounts that certainly is a hurdle (though some good apps will make it much easier).

I would like it if Twitter added some level of finesses privacy control, and it should be relatively simple. Perhaps just if you are set public you can limit to followers only by starting your tweet with @f and if you are followers only you can display a tweet public with @p.

I think the individual tweet privacy setting is inevitable. If they did it that way we'd lose two (three, with the space) characters per tweet, which sucks.

It need not. Twitter would just have to not count "@p" towards the 140 character limit and then filter it out from what it shows when posted. 140 is not the hard technological limit for SMS message lenght, 160 is.

But any individual tweet privacy setting would have to be included in the tweet or exclude use by SMS users.