Did you lose a lot of followers today? Have no fear… Twitter still loves you!

Today, Twitter will be rolling out a spam list removal protocol which will result in many users noticing a great decrease in followers. This is great to see that Twitter is taking efforts to purge their database of the spammy followers, which essentially give a false sense of quality follower levels.

From Twitter’s official blog:

we’ll be releasing a change later this afternoon that will start removing deleted and suspended users from your list of followers. As this hasn’t been cleaned up previously, you may notice your follower counts go down. This is to be expected.

They later updated with this statement:

Also: on the decreased followers, this will not happen all at once but over time.

This roll-out explains why I, personally have not yet been effected by this, but have noticed (Via TwitterCounter’s Top 100 List) some of the Twitter Elite suffering a dramatic hit in the ‘hundreds’ of followers over-night!

The greatest of these seems to have been @newmediajim taking a 403 follower hit! In the image below, notice the drastic drop in numbers from yesterday to today!

So, when you notice your numbers plummet today over the next few days, don’t take offense! Twitter still loves you!

Please remember to follow me if you aren’t already! @TheBusyBrain

[Update December 21, 2008] – It looks like Twitter finally got to my account last night! I took a hit of 395 Followers! I guess I’m right up there with the big boys in appeal by the spammers! Ohh yippie!