Will Twitter’s new follower limit limit its growth?
While FriendFeed is enjoying a wave of positive press and the sweet sweet glow of early adopter geek love, Twitter has been fighting off performance issues and the missives of disgruntled core users for what feels like many months now. To be fair, the dreaded “fail whale” has been less visible of late, meaning that Twitter has managed to stay operational (if not speedy) for the most part.
However, I’ve noticed a steady stream of spammers infiltrating Twitter over the last few months, and especially over the last several weeks. These are profiles that “follow” several thousand Twitter members while only publishing a few posts, sometimes including links to whatever service or website or scam that the spammer is pitching.
Twitter has become increasingly aggressive in deleting spammers out of its system. The Twitter Blog defines “follow spam” as “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.” David Risley translates Twitter’s new moves to curb follow spam as a rule that blocks profiles from following more than 2,000 profiles, with those who have already surpassed that mark (but who have not been kicked out for spamming) getting grandfathered in. Another implication, as Risley notes, could be that Twitter will eventually charge people to follow more than 2,000 profiles (or some other milestone, perhaps).
Personally, I think that Twitter probably is trying to get its house in order more than experimenting with future monetization schemes at present. That said, my concern is that setting a follower ceiling may inhibit Twitter’s long-term growth.
Right now I follow about 225 profiles on Twitter, and about 450 people follow me (see my profile here). It’s not unreasonable to think that over the course of a few years that that number could grow to close to 2,000. Once I’m in danger of “capping out” I’d be forced to edit the people I follow, or split my Twitter activities into multiple accounts, which devalues my experience as well as that of the community at large.
A more realistic scenario to consider – and this is where the danger lurks for Twitter’s long-term success – involves businesses who wish to legitimately promote themselves on Twitter. These are people, companies, bloggers, and websites who wish to actively engage the community while providing information and links about a service or website. Think about it: if you add 50 people a day, you’re going to hit 2,000 pretty quickly.
So if Twitter all of the sudden is a less valuable place for businesses to promote themselves, it stands to reason that they would concentrate on other social media platforms – like Facebook and FriendFeed – that are friendlier to their purposes. And that of course threatens to further degrade Twitter’s overall value to its community.
Finally, it just occurred to me that many of the spammers I’ve seen around Twitter of late linger just under the 2,000 cap (appledaddy is a great example – it follows 1,795 profiles with just 42 friends and one tweet as of this writing). So simply setting a cap may just cause spammers to hit a mark just under and simply “spawn” new profiles.
