{"id":2586,"date":"2008-08-12T16:48:37","date_gmt":"2008-08-12T20:48:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=2586"},"modified":"2008-08-12T16:48:37","modified_gmt":"2008-08-12T20:48:37","slug":"no-one-actually-follows-2000-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2008\/08\/12\/no-one-actually-follows-2000-people\/","title":{"rendered":"No one actually “follows” 2,000 people"},"content":{"rendered":"

There’s plenty of discussion<\/a> out there (and I use that term loosely) about Twitter imposing limits on the number of people users can follow. This seems to have gotten started by a post from Brent Csutoras saying he ran into<\/a> a 2,000-follower limit and was surprised by it, even though co-founder Evan Williams described<\/a> the rationale for the limits on the Twitter blog in a post last week — including the fact that there is no hard-and-fast number for how many followers you can have, something he expanded on in a comment<\/a> on GigaOm.<\/p>\n

When I first saw these reports, I wondered the same thing that Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch does in his post<\/a>: namely, who the heck can follow 2,000 (or more) people on Twitter? I realize that Loic LeMeur of Seesmic and the Scobleizer and others have tens of thousands of people they follow, and claim that this enriches their lives greatly, but I don’t think they mean the same thing by “follow” that any rational person would (and Loic’s argument seems to boil down<\/a> to the fact that it’s polite to follow people back if they follow you). <\/p>\n

If I recall correctly, Scoble has said that with 20,000 people on his follow list, he gets a tweet every second, or more. I would argue that’s just white noise at best — like having the radio on while you’re doing something else. It’s certainly not actually paying attention to someone. Twitter’s limits seem like a sensible response to “follow spam,” which has been on the increase, and I hope they don’t cave in just because some people want to brag about how many people they’re following.<\/p>\n

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There’s plenty of discussion out there (and I use that term loosely) about Twitter imposing limits on the number of people users can follow. This seems to have gotten started by a post from Brent Csutoras saying he ran into a 2,000-follower limit and was surprised by it, even though co-founder Evan Williams described the … <\/p>\n

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