Or at least, drop them from however many billions a day down to just a couple.

Yep! Direct Messaging will finally be useful again! Yay!

Here’s the trick:

1. Follow @optmeout
2. Wait till @optmeout follows you back (won’t be long)
3. Send @optmeout a DM (anything, it doesn’t matter)
4. Then you can unfollow @optmeout any time you like

What does this do?

@optmeout is run by TweetLater (now called Social Oomph). Well, guess where the vast majority of the auto DMs are coming from? That’s right. Social Oomph users. By opting out, no Social Oomph user will auto dm you.

I never knew just how many of them there were, but boy, this has made DMing fun again! Try it, you’ll like it!

For more details, here’s the official page.

1. Twittergrader is definitely the daddy. Everyone looks here for their ranking. It grades according to a secret formula (much like KFC, but with fewer chickens), & you can see who are the highest ranked by your city or location.

2. Twitterholic has top users by number of followers, friends & by updates.

3. Twitdir has top 100 by followed, followers, updates & most favourite (so if you want to find quotable people, here’s the place)

4. Twitterposter is cute. It shows you a massive picture, but the size of each person’s icon is proportional to how much influence they have on twitter.

5. Wefollow is a new popular site. It has top users by tag, city & overall

6. Twittercounter has a nice simple list of the top 100 most popular twitter users

7. Twittown is also clean & simple, just the top 150, sortable by followers/followed, or number of updates.

I’m sure there are other ways out there, so if you find more, please let me know!

[Edit: Thanks to Twitter_Tips, 8. Twitalyzer is like TwitterGrader, but more thorough & balanced – takes into account not just followers/friends, but also how useful your tweets are, how much you’re retweeting others & them you. You can check yourself out without having to login, and (best of all) it gives you tips on how to improve your rating! Could this be a contender for the top spot?)

TwitterBacks has a handful of files & instructions to create your own professional looking twitter background.

Here’s a really stunning tutorial on how to create a multi-layered repeating background.

If you want to know exactly where on the page to put everything (how many pixels from the left & top edge etc), here are the recommended specifications (more here).

An ultimate guide to setting up your twitter background (I’m sure there’s an even-more-ultimate one floating around out there somewhere!)

Here are a few high quality backgrounds you can use.

A great list of links to resources where you can find, literally, hundreds of thousands of great images to use as your background.

This guy goes completely over the top! 37 steps to creating your own, hand drawn twitter background. Of course, you have to be an awesome artist (I’m not), but it’s pretty amazing to watch the details of someone else at work.

and if you want to get excited by different people’s backgrounds, Peerkr.net allows you to add a widget to your toolbar, which if you click it, removes all the twitter information from the page, so you can see the person’s entire background. Neat!