1. I don’t agree with anyone who stigmatizes lists of recommended Twitter users. I rely on good aggregators to point me to things that are likely to interest me. Anyone who finds this sort of thing unearned or unfair comes off as merely envious to me.
2. The term “tribe leader” amuses me, perhaps because I don’t fully understand it in comparison to, say, bloggers who encourage interesting conversations with their commenters.
3. I suggest the case can be made that anyone with your size follow list is following that many people merely to retain their attention. I don’t think you make a practical case for effectively communicating with them all.
4. Commenter #12 also takes yet another opportunity to artificially conflate your article on Twitter etiquette with his feelings about the service itself, and follows up by hawking his favorite competing service, as he did on allthingsd a few weeks ago.

Interesting article. It does bring up a question that I’ve wondered about for a long time: why does someone (such as yourself), who knowingly cannot actually read all that you’ve signed up for, follow hundreds of thousands of people? What’s the purpose?

As you said, you can follow thousands of individuals, rather than tweets — and that I understand: when I’m in a hurry, I tend to jump to certain individual’s accounts and ignore the overall stream. I get that.

But even concentrating on people rather than posts, it’s humanly impossible to actively follow the goings-on of 300,000 (let alone 600,000) individuals (unless every one of them is very, very quiet): you said yourself in a comment that it was impossible to simply click on that many people in order to manually follow them, so clearly reading that many people is that much more impossible.

So if you’re only keeping track of a certain number of people anyway — even if that number is a couple of, or even a few, thousand — why keep those excess hundreds of thousands on your following list? I don’t even mean in terms of interaction, such as the comments by Guillermo asking why one should follow someone who does not respond: after all, while interaction is good, if I read problogger, it’s because I’m interested in what he may say, not because I expect him to be interested in what I may say. But in terms of the number of followings, from a simple reading standpoint, why fill a page with hundreds of thousands of individuals knowing that most will never be read anyway?

I understand Rose’s comment above about having a large stream of information, but if you’re not actually able to keep up with that stream of information, then most of that stream is flowing by unread. So what’s the purpose of having such an overflow? Is it in the hope of coming across something interesting now and then by random chance, like meandering blindly around an unorganized, uncategorized Library of Alexandria? Is it simply about building an audience for yourself/your own projects/work/wares/whatever (i.e., the goal of having so many followings is to have many followers for your own content)? Is it a question of preferred etiquette?

I don’t mean these as snarky questions, so I hope they don’t come across as such. I am simply fascinated/confused as to what purpose there is (barring someone’s desire for large numbers as you mention in point #4) for following so many people knowing that you’re really only capable of paying attention to so few. I’m not ashamed to admit that the concept boggles me.

Thanks.

Thanks for the feedback. I guess all I would say is that it follows hollow to me, if I follow someone only to get my friend count higher. In your case, that is kind of the point, but for me it reminds me of the early myspace craze to get the highest number of friends. Anyways, I’m going to follow you on twitter, and again, great article.

The only thing I will say is this: I don’t think any friend recommendation service, regardless of the service, is perfect.

For Facebook, I have people recommending complete strangers to me through their new suggest a friend service.

For Friendfeed, the most popular users and their friends dominate the list (a quick snapshot of the list shows, at least for me, a who’s who of the tech crowd, and that’s a turnoff because it’s the same old people. Not a knock on the people there, but I’d like to see new people).

@Guillermo – I just wanted to say it’s also about the power of the stream of information. It’s not just about a specific individual but the ability to toss something out and see what comes back or to drop in and see what’s being talked about. The more people you follow / follow you in your nitches the larger a stream you are working with. Sure @problogger doesn’t have time to reply to all of the thousands of followers he has but he contributes to the stream and replies to the stream when he can. It might be you or it might be someone else. If it’s something that you find interesting that’s the reason to follow someone. They become a drop in your stream of information. The more quality drops the more chances you find something when you look.

I prefer gaining organic traffic who keep following me b/c they find my content valuable. You can increase your following plenty quick by using Twitter’s search feature and interacting with people on your particular area of interest.

Twitter is designed to interact. While it is useful to follow for the sake of being informed (ie: FoxNews, NPR, CNN)

I agree with Robert Scobe’s comment. If you don’t earn the traffic, you have no reason to try and keep it!

@Marko, I have tried the other services but can’t seem to really get into them. I do like the Gmail Twitter Widget, but the browser remains my favorite.

@Opinionated Ant Spam in the traditional sense (bots, that sort of thing)? Not really. I do see a lot of well meaning people though get caught up in re-tweeting services that are pretty sketchy though.

@Guillermo I’d like to think I’m good at keeping a two-way communication with the folks following me. I may not see all of the tweets initially, but I do visit people’s profiles quite often to catch up on what they’re doing and chat with them.

It really depends on who you’re following. I know some folks with a few hundred people following them (including myself) where they don’t normally tweet back with people following them.