Twitter is starting to limit how many other Twitterers any one person can follow. While the number varies based on different factors, for most people (other than Robert Scoble) the ceiling seems to be 2,000. This has caused some consternation among bloggers (blogsternation?). You’d think Twitter was limiting free speech. But it’s not. It’s trying to limit spam and perhaps this will help with its scaling issues as well.
There is still no limit on how many people can follow you. And some people (like Scoble, who follows 21,000 people), may be grandfathered in. For normal humans, though, there is really no need to follow more than a few hundred people. (Although, a fake follow would be nice just so people don’t feel bad when you don’t reciprocate their follows).
But the power of Twitter is more about how many people are following you than how many you are following. It is about pulling together an audience and talking to them directly, and letting them reply directly in a way that seems intimate but is still quasi-public.
The limit on how many people you can follow actually reinforces this dynamic. When you send out a Tweet, it is a one-to-many communication. When you follow other people’s tweets, that becomes a many-to-one river that quickly becomes hard to manage.
Some people are suggesting that Twitter might start charging a premium subscription for people who want to follow more than 2000 others. But I’m not sure there’s much of a business there. Hard-core Twitterers might be more willing to pay for guaranteed up time or other extra features. If Twitter is going to charge heavy users extra, it would make more sense to charge people who have a gazillion followers because they have more to lose if they can’t use Twitter: their audience. Except that would only work if there were no other alternatives they could migrate to, such as FriendFeed or Identi.ca .
And if you ask Twitter co-founder Evan Williams what his business model will be, as we did, he’ll tell you he is thinking more along the lines of charging commercial users of the service than power users.And that’s probably a good idea, because alienating the power users is a sure way to drive them to other services, and their audiences with them.
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Robert Scoble sad case
when did being followed become so exciting. how does twitter monetize?
I don’t think the fuss, such that it is, is about the number of people you follow - the folks at Twitter seem reasonable, and will likely make exceptions for certain people who feel like they can manage that level of noise.
It seems more to be about the feeling of Twitter freedom disappearing. As was recently written, one of Twitters power is the way the issue of audience is treated. This directly affects that, and some people may fear this is the beginning of many restrictions they won’t like.
The only problem with the limit is that the ones who hit it are the ones who will scream the loudest about it.
I don’t want to imagine Scoble’s RSS feed with Twitter on it! I think that’s not the way Twitter should be used!
Brightkite is better.
You must have far too much time on your hands if you are actually able to follow 2000. I struggle to read all updates with a mere 40 or so…
I can’t imagine ever being able to tackle more than the hundred-ish I have at the moment. But if they must impose a limit then I’d rather see them implement this as a premium rate option.
The whole fake follow thing doesn’t sit too well with me either, it feels a bit underhand- I agree with Intuitor that surely groups on twitter would counter this problem in a more whole some way- also this would be a bit odd with people following 20k people and others knowing 2k was the limit.
I believe the whole concept of adding Twitter followings has evolved into this notion: by now adding a new following only means that we appreciate seeing tweets by that person appear on our friends’ extremely volatile timeline.
For more thorough research I recommend the ‘local search’ feature in TweetDeck. It adds a very useful and unique function to this way of ‘following’ your contacts by limiting Twitter keyword search results to just the people that you follow.
Following too many people dilutes the value of Twitter. I follow around 95 and have gotten to the point where I will not increase that number.
If you aren’t interesting, sorry but I aint gonna follow you. If you are interesting, you’ll probably knock out someone else from my list that just isn’t doing it for me.
I wish they’d focus on groups rather than following limits. It’d be easier to follow 2,000+ people if you could sort them into groups.
If it’s scalability they’re worried about, maybe an AJAX “Recent” feed would help. I know refreshing the whole page every few seconds strains the servers a bit more than a simple AJAX page.
They all have limits, just like the Facebook 5000 friend limit..
http://blabtech.blogspot.com
Scoble? Jason Calacanis has even more, and uses Twitter very effectively as a marketing tool - for the most part without offending many people. My hunch is that Twitter is pre-empting Scoble and Calacanesque copycats because more than a handful of massive users like that would overload the servers.
If someone creates a spam account, they can still follow 2,000 people in a day, then create spamaccount2 an follow another 2,000 people. It really doesn’t solve the spam problem. It just forces them to make more accounts.
No Friend limits here! Hell no content or conversation to get in the way either, because apparently the only thing people want to do on Social Networks is friend the hell out of everyone.
http://www.friendmenow.com/
http://www.friendmenow.com/home/why
“alienating the power users is a sure way to drive them to other services, and their audiences with them.”
Such bullshit. Power users have been threatening to leave twitter for a while now, and no one gives a damn. If you think twitter is now powered and dependent on power users you’re sadly mistaken.
I have lots of love for Twitter…but…
I’m using my OpenIDs a lot lately…I expect to spend more and more time using Identi.ca and Rejaw…
As an example, leo laporte left for jaiku a while back and quickly came back to twitter with his tail between his legs. His audience never followed.
If you are following near or over 2000 people there is no way you are actually reading all those tweets, and thus there is no reason to burden twitter just to have a high number show up after the word “Following”
I’m following more than 2,000 on Twitter because more than 2,000 follow me there, it’s a courtesy, if u follow me, I’m gonna follow u back =)
http://twitter.com/MarkMayhew
I think this is the first step towards offering a premium service. Today’s limit is 2000, give it a year and that could easily drop to 200 with an inexpensive premium service for people who want to follow/be followed by more.
Be interesting to see if they apply this to Barack Obama, who is the first candidate to really use Twitter and is following nearly 60,000 - using Twitter to make announcements.
For me i find the power in twitter is who i follow, not who follows me. The main benifit i get is checking out the URL’s to interesting blog posts from people with similar interests. Lately i’ve become more of a twitter spectator and although spend time on it only twit a few times a day.
I think 70 - 200 people is optimum for following depending on how much time you have for twitter.
exactly. The power is NOT in how many people are following you, as this post suggests. That’s the ego-centric view of things.
If anything, it’s the other way around. I’d rather people listen more and talk less.
Now, can you listen to 2000+ people? No. But I don’t think it should be the service that dictates that. That’s the individual’s issue to manage for him/herself.
The rule is apparently that you can follow 2000 people or as many people are following you, whichever is greater. Seems like a reasonable rule since those who are actually worth following will be able to follow more people. Hence, if you hit the limit, the solution is simply to become more interesting. Personally, I follow 66 people (and am followed by 68) and that’s already as much as I’m likely to be able to actually read.
@Erick
“You’d think Twitter was limiting free speech. But it’s not. ”
No I wouldnt think that because they arent a govt entity in any way shape or form. Can we finally try to not place constitutional requirements on private businesses please?
This is the kind of misbehavior twitter creates. Use the reply button, not the @username twit-speak.
This is a dumb “answer” to spam. They, the bearers of spam, aren’t stupid… they’ll just create multiple accounts and continue doing their “business”. The non-spammy end-user just ends up with more restrictions. Meh, either way, this doesn’t bother me too much. Many companies tend to find retarded ways to deal with spam.
What I *do* have a problem with is Twitter deleting my old, archived tweets. I’m not sure if many have noticed this but it pisses me off. Surely I’m not the only one that likes to reference my old tweets. You know, look back upon the lol-moments you thought were lol-moments only to find they were damn-I-drink-too-much moments. The irony of this is I was preparing to tweet about how frustrating it is to go through my Twitter archives, page-by-effing-page - only to find I no longer had many effing pages to go through.
Stupid Twitter.
I have to agree here, what’s the point of watching all those people? You’re never going to read it all, so why not keep it to people you actually want to read?
Twitter is 100% about feeding narcissistic egos. As long as twitter doesn’t limit the number of people who can follow the narcissist twits who use the service, it will continue to thrive. Twitter realizes this, so they want to limit the number of twits you can follow so you can focus more of your attention on fewer people, thus increasing the intensity of the spotlight focused on any one twit’s ego.
The way you monetize twitter is easy in the extreme. Simply charge people based on the number of followers you will allow them to have, say $1/each per year. You’ll all be shocked at the number of people who shell out tens of thousands of dollars for the glory of having tens of thousands of followers.
Don’t underestimate the size of egos and the number of undiagnosed sociopaths using twitter. There’s a mountain of gold in the pockets of those twits.
Get a life all you twitter dorks!
to follow or not no follow?
I don’t use twitter, but i believe it’s an unecessary restriction to offer only two alternatives, They could allow different degrees or intensities of following:
An “intimate” follower would wan’t to read all the messages,
others would want to read only messages classified by the person as “important/interesting”, or “very interesting”, etc…
The actual purpose of following 2000 plus people? Just wondering.
While following 2,000 others may be extreme, I still see some value in it. One can go on there periodically to take a pulse of people they’re interested in, even if they’re not getting the full fountain. Then they can pay more attention to a smaller bunch via IM, SMS, email, etc.
Man, I am ever tired of hearing about Twitter.
You tc people missing something, there should be option to make follow groups in twitter. Like “business related”, “friends”, “political”, “not so important people”, “whatever” or even “fake”, that can be organised/named by users. Just like folder / group system in mails. Limiting max. no. of follows in each group to say 500. In that case i can follow 20,000 or 2000.
I thought of telling this in previous blog posts related to twitter and friendfeed, but refrained from giving away my idea
I thought about the same sometime back. And twitter is such an exciting place that even Arrington & Schonfield could do a lot if twitter introduces social bookmarking as well.
And why not follow a rating system, say if some 100 people rate a person at 1 star, that person can be called a spammer on twitter.
I think people join twitter for various reasons: to network, to talk to friends / colleagues, branding, popularity, tracking conversation, tracking reputation, etc.
i disagree - it’s not about how many people are following you but about how many you can follow - twitter is about discovering and following interesting people and there are way more than 2000 of them on Twitter.
I definitely agree with you on this point but ultimately what matters is the end result and how it affects the internet users.
If you’re looking forward to network with people to market who you are, that’s absolutely fine. even I look forward to networking with a lot of people on twitter and that is why I follow so many people out there though twitter has just limited me from following any more people on there.
You might be thinking that I don’t have the time to read each tweet but I do reply to every direct message I receive and even to most of the replies, many of them by DM.
I don’t follow people to read their tweets but to create relationships.
Talking to people and adding value can prove what you can offer them and help them to succeed the way they wish to.
After all, it’s all about leadership and contribution - adding immense value to other people that creates a boomerang back to you.
And quality contribution is what matters at the end of the day.
For me the question is not whether I can follow 2′000 people and read all lf their messages but more HOW I personally use twitter.
Twitter came up as a micro-blogging tool but I use it more lika kind of a news source. The people I follow are the most active and talkative Twitter users, sometimes I get the impression that some are on 24/7 /almost). I love to be able to just kind of dive in the news torrent and hear about what is going on in Silicon Valley, aka Geektown. As interesting news spreads amongst a lot of these users, I almost always find out what is going on right now in the interwebs.
Personally, i’d like to be able to follow more than 2′000 people, not because I can really read all that stuff but to get even more information about what’s moving the twittosphere.
On the other hand, I can clearly see why Twitter is limiting the followerd but I am not really sure it this will keep spammers out as they hope. Spammers are amongst the most creative persons if it’s about getting around filters and limitations of all kinds. This won’t really help much imho. What could help would be some kind of “report spam” button with the possibility to temporarily freeze suspicious accounts and then have them checked by humans, though this would be hard to scale.
My conclusion: Remove the 2′000 following limit, this is useless to stop spammers anyway. If one can handle this much noise or not is a decision every user has to take for himself.
http://eatmedia.net/blog/2008/.....broadcast/
TweetDeck solves your fake-follow problem on the desktop- just don’t put anyone you don’t care about in a group you do care about. SMS is the old-school way of mobile “selective” tweeting, since you can turn on individual device notifications. Not the most desireable solution in todays’ rich phone app world, but not a horrible one either. I interact with twitter just fine from my free nokia no-frills phone, thanks to SMS.
The issue is when you want to follow people to receive their comments in your feed. It’s not about “following” or even necessarily reading everything, but it’s about publishing a conversation between you and others. Twitter offers no other way to aggregate or allow comments, which makes it ridiculously limiting.
I am also stuck at 2K follow limits, What’s the rule ? Can’t we follow more? Please Help!
The 2K follow limit really only sticks if you have significantly less followers. In January I had an account with 3000 followers while following 1500 and then managed to follow through past the 2000 no problems at all. The account was only two weeks old too.
If you’re going to follow tons of people and no-one follows you back, then sure, you’ll be stuck. But if people do appreciate your account and you have more followers than following, it doesn’t appear to be an issue.
I suppose I am the only one who doesn’t have a problem with following 2,000 people. I follow SHAQ, Huff Post, Obama, and more celebs. And I follow my friends. I also follow people from online marketers to weightloss people. The point i am making is that I follow people who might shed some light on something that I am interested in learning about or pursuing. I think that 2000 is a very small number and I don’t follow on 2000 but I like the randomness of the entries that are on my page when I do log in. To say that you can’t understand how someone can have that much time to follow 2000 ppl, then there are just as many people who wonder how anyone has time to fool with Twitter in the first place! Although I understand preventing spammers, it would help if we could still grow our followers. Stopping good people by imposing rules has never stopped crime (in real life or online). People up to know good just find another way to do what they want.
BLAH, BLAH, BLAH……
Zappos follows 410,827
I follow 2,000 people and almost 2,000 followers. I think it’s important to keep a balance between the two. Twitter is a great marketing tool but if I want to keep in contact with my friends or relatives who live out of State, I use Facebook.
BTW, follow me on Twitter and I’ll follow you back.
http://www.twitter.com/affilianet
Thank you for this great article post it was very helpful and I will use this information on my twitterventure.