interesting change indeed. Everything you wrote is true, but there is another aspect to it: to me these figures appear to be random. If so it would be some caching prevention. Since I subscribed to twitter in July the followers count is far above the true ones I can see. Twitter had some status message since beginning of August that they are aware of this problem. Sometimes my followers count decreases although I see no changes in the list (noone appeared to unfollow), so my educated guess is, that’s also a caching problem on twitters side (they have to cache such lists, don’t they). A random URL-parameter would prevent browsers and servers from caching. At least the figure changes from page to page.