I am beginning to question the accuracy of Qwitter.  I use the service on the @lifeandscience Twitter stream as a way to learn what tweets work better than others.  

The above alerts were delivered to my inbox roughly 72 hours after this tweet, “RT #wral meteorologist @nsj: Spring began with the vernal (or spring) equinox at 7:44am. The sun was directly overhead of the equator.”

I have several theories:

1) Reciprocal following retains followers. I wasn’t following any of these people, yet.  Our Twitter account gets ~7 new followers a day and I have been remiss lately in going through and following back.  One recent unfollower tweeted after her unfollowing that it’s only polite to add followers.

2) As Twitter becomes more ubiquitous, “tweet code” becomes more intimidating. Retweets/RT,  #hashtags and @replies may automatically dissuade certain followers.  My most recent Qwitter notifications have come after those kinds of tweets.

3) Qwitter’s just broken. Based on the frequency of when I receive Qwitter notifications (rarely and normally in bigger numbers like the screenshot above), it could be that this batch of qwitters was queued from several days or weeks of tweets.

I suspect it’s a combination of at least #1 and #3.  I went through each of my recent unfollowers’ Twitter stream to see if they were spammers (they weren’t) and added them to my list of followers to see if that makes a difference. I’ll report back if it does.