Twitter’s 2000-Follow Limit Raises A Ruckus

Is this really such a big deal?

I once tried following a couple hundred people, I think it was maybe 220ish? - I found it then became a chore (and was on the verge of becoming a major time sink) to sift through all the messages everyday to find anything of value.

Any sane person (realistically) is unable to follow 2000 active people, its just not rational to think so.

If it were such a big deal, then change things around - make it so that after a certain threshold, when you "follow" a user, you have to then click again to receive updates.

That way people can have their warm fuzzy feelings about having their follow reciprocated and it might help with fixing their scaling issues.

The Internet's protocols aren't suited to doing broadcast. Doing broadcast correctly requires new protocols, just like doing computer networks correctly required a departure from the physical connection-oriented view of networks that arose from telephony.

Van Jacobson's Google Tech Talk:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6972678839686672840

Actually there you have Twitter's monetization. Let free accounts follow 100 users and also let them have 100 followers. And then have different levels of premium followers for businesses who want to use tweets as a public relations tool. i.e. $20/mo bumps it up to 500, $40/mo bumps it up to 1500, $100/mo bumps it up to 5000 and $299/mo lets you have unlimited followers