Follow Me, Follow You

It’s with mixed emotions that I read Twitter is now limiting people to following a mere 2,000 people.

On one hand, it’s good to see Twitter do something to control its growth and, as David Risley suggests, it could create a way to charge people who must follow more than 2,000 people.

On the other hand, it seems completely unfair. It’s like telling someone they can only have 15 friends even if they meet someone new and interesting. “Sorry, you’ve already reached your limit so no more friends for you”.

With the 2,000-follow limit in place, it creates some interesting scenarios. For one, you’re going to have make some tough choices on who you follow. Let’s say, for example, you’re following 1,998 people, and want to add another three. You’ll be forced to not follow one of them, or you’ll have to prune your existing follow “portfolio”.

Either way, tough, tough choices that will add even more digital stress to your online worlds.

Personally, I’m following 78 people so fortunately there’s still plenty of runway left to add more people before the 2,000 limit start to loom the horizon.

Of course, the idea of following 2,000 people strikes me as digital madness, although Loic Le Meur claims he follows 10,000 people. It’s tough enough managing a small group of people on Twitter and e-mail and Facebook and Friendfeed and GMail and…Well, you get the idea.

Here’s Twitter’s explanation about the follow limit.

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