10 reasons why I follow 10 000 people on Twitter
Looks like Twitter is now limiting the number of people you can follow to 2000 (not the number of people who follow you) while I am following 9705 people as I speak (okay less than 10 000, but almost).
Jack and Evan of Twitter have been kind enough to put an "autofollow" on for me which means that when anybody starts following me, I automatically follow them. Robert Scoble had it turned on for a while too and stopped around 20 000 people he was following. I fully understand it may be a scalability issue for Twitter and I can give back this gift they gave me if they consider I am threatening Twitter's performance.
Evan describes following thousands of people generally as "follow spam":
"What is "Follow Spam?"
Follow spam is the act of following mass numbers of people, not because you're actually interested in their tweets, but simply to gain attention, get views of your profile (and possibly clicks on URLs therein), or (ideally) to get followed back. Many people who are seeking to get attention in this way have even created programs to do the following on their behalf, which enable them to follow thousands of people at the blink of any eye.
As you can imagine, this is a problem. In extreme cases, these automated accounts have followed so many people they've threatened the performance of the entire system. In less-extreme cases, they simply annoy thousands of legitimate users who get an email about this new follower only to find out their interest may not be entirely...sincere. On rare occasions we may see a person who is mass following and actually cares about every tweet—there is an opportunity for us to learn more about this use case and work to provide a better experience."
I actually like to have this feature on.
While most of the times I cannot follow about 10 000 people for obvious reasons, I like to follow them sometimes. Here is why:
1- It is not spam as each one of the people I follow have added me on their own twitter account (some have stopped following me also and that's ok!)
2- these people know me and have related to me, they deserve my attention too, when I can give it to them
3- I love watching the updates of 10 000 people that have related to me in anyway, when I have "free" time, it's just watching, being curious about them and I love to discover new people this way.
4- I would like to learn more about them, in these 10 000 people I bet there are many I would love to have dinner with because we have many interests in common and I probably don't know about them
5- It is not intrusive you can just read the last ones, Twhirl gives a great way of following "your personal firehose" and even better using XMPP over IM, it looked like a jukebox self-updating, can't wait for Twitter to activate IM again
6- You can always create another Twitter account to follow less people and add it to Twhirl (which I did I use /loic on Twitter only to listen). I listen to /loiclemeur when I have time, I listen to /loic more often
7- It is polite. When people listen to me I feel like listening to them too, just not all the time
8- It is great for events, when you really need the autofollow, during LeWeb I wanted to follow all the tweets from the people at the conference and very few used #leweb which is very geeky. I wish I could turn on autofollow for specific events instantly.
9- they can direct message me and it is good because I sometimes (rarely though) want private conversations too with my community
10- the only reason why I did not do it: it may, as @ev points out, drive attention to you. It was not my goal as these people already followed me.
What would work for me is just to be able to group my followers and turn on and off when I want to follow them. All of them if I want, only my best friends at some other moments, and so on.
update: I added two cents in video
