Let’s face it – sometimes it’s hard to keep track of what’s going on with Twitter – especially if you use an auto-follow-back feature like I do. Every time a user follows me, I automatically follow them back – but if they stop following me, I don’t automatically unfollow them. Sometimes I like to follow people, even if they’re not following me. Sometimes, though, I don’t.

So how do you manage a 1,000+ list of people you follow? Manually checking each user to see whether or not they follow you back just isn’t an option when the list of people you follow gets that large. Fortunately for you (and me), there’s a slew of Twitter applications out there that will help you to keep track of who you’re following, who’s following you back, how often they tweet, and more.

Perhaps the sleekest and easiest of these applications is Twitter Karma – it’s a straightforward and simple site that uses Twitter’s secure oAuth system to authenticate your account. Once you’ve authenticated, it scans your list of followers and friends and then shows you a simple matrix of users, along with their follow status – whether you alone follow them, whether they alone follow you, or whether you both follow each other. You can disable avatar display if you’re on a slow connection, and each user comes with a checkbox next to their username – allowing you to follow or unfollow en masse.

For me, Twitter Karma has been a lifesaver. My auto-follow-back has caused me to get a lot of spammers who follow and then, once I’ve followed back, unfollow, and my heavy Twitter usage has caused me to attract many followers who don’t always stick around. Even though they’re not following me anymore, I still see their updates in my feed, and I often don’t unfollow because I value reciprocal following.

Now, whether or not you think reciprocal following is a good or a bad thing, you’ve got to admit that applications like Twitter Karma make life significantly easier. The fact that you can choose which users to follow or unfollow makes it significantly more robust than a bulk auto-follow-back service – in fact, I might just cancel my auto-follow-back and start manually following my followers with an application like Twitter karma – at least that way I can wheedle out the obvious spammers before they have a chance to tweet their spam in my direction.