Twitter is getting more crowded and more insincere with the passing day. It is now more than possible to run into spammers, blind followers, marketers, self-proclaimed gurus and so-called marketers.

To keep focus and priceless time from being wasted, one needs to take some precautions. Below find some of my suggestions and feel free to add your ideas in comments:

1. Keep the number of friends low if you want to keep up with the flow.
2. Don’t auto-follow. This is what spammers like.
3. Don’t follow everyone following you. Hand-pick those people that interest you.
4. Don’t follow out of politeness.
5. Don’t follow only to be followed. Don’t keep score.
6. Unfollow people that spam or irritate you. Don’t reward them.
7. Check out your new follower’s bio page.
8. Check their posts.
9. Check their friend, follower and update counts. Check the followers/friends ratio. Set a threshold value for yourself to follow.
10. Check their webpages. Most out-of-the-blue followers are spammers, marketers, etc.
11. Use a grouping/filtering client like TweetDeck, Seesmic Desktop or Nambu if you have to follow everyone.
12. Arrange your friends to groups like friends, VIP, interesting etc. using these clients.
13. Occasionally use Twitter Karma to bulk unfollow peoplethat doesn’t interest you anymore.
14. Occasionally use Twitoria to remove those that are not active anymore.
15. Use services like wefollow to find interesting people. Do not rely on luck to find them.
16. Search your username using a preset search on your client. See what people are saying about you.
17. Create searches for things that interest you, sites you maintain, things you love. Feel the twitter vibe.