It took twitter quite some time to add a search bar so you can find fellow tweeters, so its no surprise that TwitDir arose as an outside tool serving as a Twitter Directory, claiming to allow you to search among 715,235 twitterers.
And since this the season of contagious listmaking, TwitDir offers the answers to the idle curiosity question of who are the top 100 people followed, the top 100 updaters, etc. The top people followed are not all that surprising… maybe.
At the top of the heap, with 6934 followers, is Twitterific, makers of the uber twitter app for MacOS. There is some sort of Mac/PC irony waiting there, buy I skip. In second, at zero surprise level is Scoble, pulling off the mazing dual marks of having 6887 followers (that’s a lot of breathing down the neck, eh) and Scoble follows 6054 others. He must get the friends prize for returning the favor in kind. IN third is Brian Shaler, a flash developer from, of all places, Phoenix- with 6709 followers, and he, like Scoble, must need sleep as Brian follows 7317 tweeters.
More odd are the top updaters:
At the top of this list is omankoxxx, who has made 253031 updates, and I have no idea what Oman is up to since its all in Chinese. Also hard to figure out is somacowmedia, having done 120217 updates that are cryptic to say the least:
[monituid:416] http://syndown.com loaded in 0.91327 seconds
[monituid:414] http://sayanythingradio.com loaded in 1.079626 seconds
[monituid:415] http://muchedumbre.com loaded in 0.426668 seconds
which looks very little like typical twittering about cats or lunch; this looks more like a continuous monitoring flow for checking web sites I guess SomaCowCIO gets these updates on his mobile phone?
More telling is that these accounts with incredible updating activity have relatively no followers or following activity. They are too busy updating??
And who can resist doing some ego surfing here- put in your own handle to see if you are “on the list”:
Woo hoo, I am in the top 1000 for followers. Look out Scoble! Yeah right.
This is awesome! I just started using Twitter and I’m already using it on mobile phone to make posts. It’s strangely liberating to type a sentence instead of a whole post to update my happenings.
Yes. I need sleep.
I hate that number: 6,709. Due to some bugs with my Twitter account, the number got stuck there. Despite getting 10+ new follower notification emails a day, my profile still says the same number it has said since July: 6,709.
I have seen it pop up to 7,700+ but it inevitably returns to 6,709. Strangely enough, I’ve noticed that “iJustine” got stuck at that number this month.
Back to Twitter…
Ah, it’s a case of lies, damn lies, and twitter followers numbers. Still, 6000+ followers sounds outlandish.