This is my Twitter algorithm. What's yours?

Personally I only want to follow people that:

a.) I know personally

b.) Tweets in such a way that interests me more than 50% of the time

So I don't actually pay attention to who follows me, and I only currently follow 14 people (though a few more follow me)

What I would say, however, is that I disagree with your "< 3 tweets/day" - I know what you're aiming at, plenty of people tweet WAY too much (I suspect I do, now and then), but there are plenty of reasons for more than three interesting tweets in a day, and it's quite possible for someone to tweet more than three times a day on a regular basis without it being annoying or pointless.

My algorithm is a little different. I analyze every follow request with what kind of information is this person going to provide--does it add to my personal network, interesting commentary on sports or what is happening in the music, snowboard and mountain scene -- if so I will follow them.

My algorithm is (notice new follower) -> (ignore). The thing I happen to like about Twitter is that it's curated. I've found plenty of interesting blog posts, videos, etc. by following a handful of people that interested me. Beyond that initial spike in follows when I first joined, I haven't actually followed someone because they started following me.

If I notice that someone is getting frequently RT'ed by some of the people I follow, and the original tweets are actually interesting to me, I start following them. I don't really use any other way of finding followers, and it's worked out fairly well for me. I have a fairly uncluttered twinbox, but I still get a healthy dose of interesting tweets.

It's all about maintaining a high signal:noise ratio.

1. They tweet about my professional interests only - CS, programming, web development/marketing/startups, or finance/trading/econ (and for the next few weeks, the World Cup). Little to no personal stuff. Get a second Twitter account for that.

2. 4:1 or higher signal:noise ratio. If I see a second tweet about your Starbucks latte being too hot, or that you just finished your daily jog and are sweating, /unfollow. DO. NOT. CARE.

So far that's about it. I don't screen based on follows, followers, tweet frequency, etc., as that has no strong correlation to tweet quality.

My constant pruning of spammers leaves me with rather depressing follower stats: http://i.imgur.com/r3tRN.png

The same goes for who I follow. I only follow 57 people as of writing, but 99% of them are people I'm truly interested in. I try to never follow more than one or two new people per week, that way I can easily see if they're worth following, or just people I'll end up skipping past.

http://twitter.com/ashleyw

I also go by the followers/follow > 1, but for N>500. If a friend of mine follows 100 people but only has 50 followers, I give them a pass. I'll flat out block someone if it's clearly a "social media expert" with follows close to followers over 1000. It's pretty clear that they aren't really following anyone and will unfollow me in 48 hours if I don't help pad their stats.

The only things I care about are whether their tweets are interesting, informative or entertaining.

I don't follow everyone I know personally, because even those people tend to be boring and spam me with minutiea of their day.

1. sign up for twitter, be excited I get my first name. 2. have no time to play on twitter