Seems to me over the past week or so Google alerts has gone a little crazy.  I am getting all kinds of alerts on both old and odd news.

In order to help manage my online identity I have an alert for "Lance Weatherby."  The other day an alert showed up entitled Twitterholic.com :Stats for Lance Weatherby (lance)  which I found interesting enough to click through. 

One of the interesting tidbits I found there was 11,711th person to sign up for twitter.  But I also saw this chart with a recent large increase in the number of my twitter followers.  I have been getting lots of followings from folks who I do not know or know of.  Just bizarre profiles trolling for followers.  Followbaiters.

The graphic ain’t too clear but is it obviously heading up.  I did a little investigating by merely changing out the user names of folks I followed in the tail end of this URL http://www.twitterholic.com/twitter/lance/ .  Every single one I looked at showed the same type of graph.

People have stopped starting following other people on twitter because they are personal friends or acquaintances in some way.  They have started following people to get more followers or to drive traffic.  Or put another way, for the good of themselves instead of the good of the community.  That is a bad thing for twitter.

And it is really starting to get out of hand.  How to you respond to this:

Jesus Christ (Jesus_Christ) is now following your updates on Twitter.
Check out Jesus Christ’s profile here:
http://twitter.com/Jesus_Christ
You may follow Jesus Christ as well by clicking on the "follow" button.

Since I don’t have a personal relationship with Jesus_Christ, I decided to delete the message.