We first covered Twerp Scan back in April of last year. At the time we commended it as a useful way to scan your list of followers for accounts that are simply following you as a way to get onto your list and hopefully be noticed - in other words, Twitter spam followers. Since then, Twerp Scan has gone through a rather dramatic redesign, and has added the ability not only to scan the accounts that are following you, but also to scan the accounts you are following.

Twerp Scan then gives you a very nicely laid-out grid of those you are following or your followers depending on what you chose. You can sort on any of the column headers, including number of followers, number following, ratio of followers to following, number of tweets, and time of last tweet. For your followers, for example, very low ratios (anything under about 1:5) typically indicates a spam account - these are people that nobody wants to follow, but follow others very indiscriminately.

Even if you don't want to use Twerp Scan to eliminate spam followers because you want to hold onto all of the followers you've got to boost your follower numbers, it is also a useful tool for viewing and managing the Twitter accounts that you are following. You get all the same column headers, and the ability to sort the list any way you like, including sorting on multiple headings. You can also click on any row in the grid to get additional details about that Twitter account.

Twitter, when used correctly, is the ultimate meritocracy. You can freely follow anyone you want, and just as freely unfollow them. For most users this means following people whose tweets they perceive they are gaining value from, and not following people who waste their time. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule, particularly when it comes to so many of the self-professed "Social Media Consultants" that seem to pollute my inbox when they meaninglessly follow me. But for the most part, the average Twitter user wants to get value out of what they read using the service, and provide value to their followers.

I'm puzzled then when services like Pay Me Tweets pop up, wanting you to trade your hard-earned credibility with your followers for a few measly (or should I call them weasly?) bucks. Basically, you're trading your followers' attention for money, something they will likely not appreciate. And what do users do on Twitter when they are not getting value any longer? They unfollow, of course!

While I think that users who choose to sell their credibility to Pay Me Tweets are making a big mistake, the people that choose to buy tweets through this service are making an even bigger one.

If you've been on Twitter over the past day or so, you may have noticed some big changes to the way the site shows users' lists of followers and followees. Instead of just showing names and icon, these pages now display more detailed information, including location and most recent tweet. All of the actions you have available for each user are collected into a compact drop-down menu, so you can mention, direct message, block, follow or unfollow the user quickly.

Several users have correctly pointed out that the new design makes Twitter look a lot more like an iPhone-optimized site. It's definitely an improvement in many ways, but there's one small quirk I have to take issue with: in the old layout, the appearance of the "direct message" link next to a username gave a quick visual indication of whether that user was following you. You can still figure this out by clicking the drop-down menu, but it's definitely not as efficient as before. On the other hand, the new design does a great job of showing who you're following when you browse another user's list.

Is Twitter a popularity contest? If you think so, then you might be interested in Twitter-Train, but for the sane people reading this you'll probably want to move on.

Twitter-Train is essentially a pyramid scheme whereby if you follow a prescribed list of Twitter accounts, you will be added to that same list for the next 40 Twitter-Train users. Basically, by willfully polluting your Twitter stream with updates from Twitter accounts that you care nothing about, you get the benefit of being followed by 40 people that care nothing about you. That's a win-win if I ever saw one.

I mean seriously, what is the point of this? I can think of only one, and that would be if you somehow got paid to inflate an account's Twitter followers by any means possible. But in terms of real value, there is none to be had here. You now have to filter through tweets that mean nothing to you, and the "followers" that you acquire are essentially doing the same thing.

I suspect this is one of the reasons that Twitter has not yet added host-side filtering to the service (the other being that Twitter seems busy just keeping the service up). Twitter clients like TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop offer client-side filtering, which allows you to "follow" huge amounts of people while actually ignoring them. While I suppose to each their own, it's still frustrating to see how users willfully abuse a system just to inflate their follower numbers to appear more important. Twitter seems to agree, given that they are disabling the auto-follow feature that had been enabled for certain select Twitter users.

I think Twitter should hide follower counts so that there is very little ego-boost from having a huge number of followers. This isn't going to stop people that want to use Twitter as a spamming service, but it will kill the ego game that is plaguing most social networks.

One way to figure out whether you should follow someone on Twitter is by seeing who your mutual friends. Twtrfrnd makes that very easy: just enter your username and someone else's, and it does the rest. Soon, it will even let you log in to automatically see friends you have in common with people who have recently followed you.

Finding common friends is a good way to know whether a specific person might be worth following, but anybody can follow a lot of your friends. It's not the most selective way of doing things. That's why there's also the "indicators" list. It shows you which of your friends are following someone, giving you a more accurate indicator of how interested you might be in that person's updates.

If you're an obsessive Twitter user, you probably notice when someone stops following you. How do you figure out who it is, though? It can be tough, especially if you have a lot of followers. Well, now there's FriendOrFollow, a site that tells you who's not following you back, and who you're not following.

FriendOrFollow is handy for discovering new folks to follow, adding people you might have forgotten, and dropping people (if you're the type to ditch those who don't reciprocate.) FriendOrFollow is a lot like another service that's been around for a whie, Twitter Karma, but it's faster and more reliable. Since there's been more than one attempt to implement this functionality, there must be some kind of demand for it. Perhaps one day you'll see it built into Twitter.

If you're new to the whole Twitter scene, and your friends have yet to climb on the bandwagon, your Twitter page might be looking awful lonely. You might have no one to stalk, er, follow-and no one is following you. Enter the Twitter Pack Project, a wiki where the community recommends fellow Twitter-ers by topic of interest or geographical area.

The Twitter Pack Project has lists of all shapes and sizes. For example, if you're an Apple nerd, you can find a list of Twitter-ers whose Tweets are more or less related to Apple. Like having a good belly laugh? Visit the laugh pack and become a follower of your favorites. Want to follow fellow Twitter-ers in the same city? Packs exist for San Francisco, Los Angeles, and more; basically every major metropolitan area is included.

If you don't find a pack to suit you, you are encouraged to sign up for the wiki and create your own (the invite key is: project). You can add new lists to existing packs (say, a new geographical location) or create an entirely new pack (for example, packs by birthday dates, and so on).

So what are you waiting for? Get to following.

In a recent study, Google was found to have some of the most loyal followers according to recent studies.

The studies looked at online services, computing, and consumer services divisions of the IT world. The surveys measured the importance in customer's eyes, and which overall services you would recommend.

Apple and Symantec were also ranked high on the Satmetrix survey.