Twitter's 2000-Follow Limit Raises A Ruckus. But How Many People Can You Seriously Watch Anyway?
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.