Twitter Denies Definite Limits On Following
Only targeting "follow spam"
It’s probably not a safe assumption that there’s a limit on the number of people one can actually follow on Twitter. After all, it’s possible someone has no life to prevent them being able to monitor a stream of thousands. Hey, if people actually camped out or bought scalped tickets to see "The Dark Knight" instead of just waiting 12 hours, then it’s possible to justify almost anything.
It’s sort of requirement, for example, that Robert Scoble follow 21,000 people. This is his gig. Personally, I follow 237 people very poorly. I’m fond of a few of them, but wouldn’t notice if many of them disappeared off the face of the Earth, and have no interest in building up a huge list of people to follow. This is generally how I am in real life, too. If in the real world you’re a Calacanis, tweeting incessantly and saying nothing, then you’ll be unfollowed quicker than I can start my car and drive away.
I’ve got things to do.
But with something like Twitter, it’s not about managing the personality quirks and relative gregariousness of one person. It’s about managing all types in the fairest of ways as well as Twitter spam. Bloggers this morning nonetheless were miffed at new restrictions put on the number of people one can follow.
The current follow threshold appears to be 2,000, as Brent Csutoras and others (some of whom also have multiple accounts) are discovering. There was a brief ballyhoo over the assumptions Twitter was limiting the number of people that can follow a particular account. That’s since been cleared up by Twitter founders.
Twitter instated the limit to combat Twitter spam and insists there is no actual limit to the number of people a person can actually follow, just a limit to the number of people a person can follow in a certain time period, and that limit is directly proportionate to the number of people a person has following them, among some other factors undisclosed for the same reason Google doesn’t disclose many of its own parameters.
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