» Twitter - Will they really limit the number of people you can follow

Twitter - Will they really limit the number of people you can follow

August 13th, 2008 by Andreas from Xavier Media

I just read some horrible news. Twitter may limit the number of people you can follow to maximum 2000 people. Ok, 2000 is a kind of OK amount of people to follow, but still…..

Most people don't follow more then 2000 people on Twitter, but if you for example create an application using their API, then you could get more then 2000 to follow. For example our Twitterbot at twitter.xaviermedia.com is set to start following everyone that follows him. That means that after 2000 people no more can get followed by our bot.

This could unfortunately effect more then just our bot. Any other application that want to follow more then 2000 people would get problems, so I really hope they just add this limit to get people to upgrade to some kind of premium account for "professional Twitters" like our bot (or any other application using for example their API).

We're currently adding support for Twitter in next version of our search engine XavierSeek.com and I really hope this will not make any problems for us…..

I should mention that this is just a work in progress (i.e. they haven' t made any decissions yet) and it's for a good cause: Fighting Follow Spam. "Follow Spam" is someone following a large amount of Twitters just to get attention (get them to read their profile and maybe even click their web site URL).

How many do you follow?

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 13th, 2008 at 6:47 pm and is filed under Twitter, Xavier Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Big Ben Patton Says:
August 15th, 2008 at 3:31 am

Im quite a ways from 2k, but this does not go inline with the idea of microblogging or being social. I mean seriously could you never have more than 2k rss subs? Not likely. I hope they choose another method.

Big Ben Pattons last blog post..MarketLeverage - Leverage The Power Of Their Network

jj-momscashblog Says:
August 16th, 2008 at 5:23 am

Hi Xavier, I can't believe how many blogs you run, saw it on blog roll. How do you keep up? If twitter does implement this limit I normally would ask how can anyone follow 2000 people? But I bet you could especially having as many blogs as you do. Good Luck!