As much as I enjoy Twitter, I hate those crazy Twitter limits! Twitter is all about building your social network by adding new Friends and hoping they Follow you back. But, those unpublished Twitter plateaus are frustrating. It seems every time I am on a roll, I hit one. Adding too many Friends within a certain period of time. The only way around it is to weed out your account periodically, and Twitter does not offer any tools to help you do that.
One of the first 3rd party sites to offer such a tool is Twitter Karma. But, if you try loading a large account, Twitter Karma turns into Bad Karma by only submitting a portion of your update request. I have killed way too much time submitting removal requests of 15-20 Friends at a time through Twitter Karma and then switching to Twitter to see if the request is being processed!
My solution has been to use TwiPing. This FREE desktop application resides on your computer, so you do not have to worry about giving a strange website access to your Twitter account. After you install the program (only Windows XP/Vista at this time), you enter your Twitter account information. TwiPing then collects a list of your Friends and Followers and compares the two to find “Friends not following me” and “Followers I’m not following“. The newest addition is the creation of a Safe List for Friends you never want to unfollow. This makes managing your Twitter account easy! Simply click on the account or Control-click on several accounts and press the Follow Selected button or the Stop Following Selected button. TwiPing also offers keyword searches to filter through your current lists . But, TwiPing can also perform keyword searches against twitter.com to find new Twitter accounts to follow. This program just gets better and better.
For large accounts, TwiPing can take time to collect all of your lists (ex. 15+ minutes). Also, you will need to manually Refresh Your Follow Lists prior to every use to be sure that it is up-to-date. But, these are minor issues compared to the benefits.
TwiPing is a great desktop program which finally allows real Contact Management for your Twitter account!