Jonesy, your script's got a persistent error upon closing the dialog: > * Invalid parameters: $did (line 19, testing.mrc)Perhaps you should make a check to see if it's closed or not?

Sorry, i meant like, how the sockmark overcomes the issue of looping? :\
Ok, I think I missed your point... But still, I believe you don't need the updatefollowers alias and just use:

alias TrackFollowers {
  set -e %Twitter.Track $$1
  dialog $iif($dialog(TrackFollowers),-v,-m) trackfollowers trackfollowers
  sockopen $+(TrackFollowers.,$ticks) twitter.com 80
}
on *:Sockopen:TrackFollowers.*: {
  sockwrite -nt $sockname GET $+(/,%Twitter.Track) HTTP/1.1
  sockwrite -nt $sockname Host: twitter.com
  sockwrite -nt $sockname $crlf
}
on *:Sockread:TrackFollowers.*: {
  var %x | sockread %x
  if $regex(%x,<span id="follower_count" class="stats_count numeric">(.*) </span>) {
    var %c = $calc($remove($regml(1),$chr(44)) - $remove($did(TrackFollowers,202),$chr(44)))
    did -ra TrackFollowers 302 $iif($did(TrackFollowers,202),$iif(%c > 0,%c ( $+ $calc($ctime - %Twitter.Last) secs),$did(TrackFollowers,302)),n/a)
    did -ra TrackFollowers 202 $regml(1)
    did -ra TrackFollowers 400 Updated: $fulldate
    set -e %Twitter.Last $ctime
    sockopen $+(TrackFollowers.,$ticks) twitter.com 80
    .sockclose $sockname
  }
}

Which saves you 3 bytes. :p