You are unable to follow more people. Come on, we KNOW you haven’t that many friends.
For those who are human (or at least from SkyNet) your RSS feeds have been flooded with bickering’s about the new Twitter following cap - a measly 2,000!
When you are ‘following’ someone, that means that you have subscribed to their feed. When you log into your own Twitter account, their feeds are integrated into the list of your own. In no mean do I label myself an average Twitter, I do it randomly when on MSN - as stupid as it may sound, it has sparked some good conversations. I average about 5 ‘tweets’ a day, but do not often check my actual Twitter page (I set a custom RSS feed, using FriendFeed and Yahoo! Pipes). A Twitter profile has 20 entires per page, if you were to check your Twitter page 4 times a day, on average, 2000 subscribed users give you 80 pages of redundant information. Now how many pages would I get if I was a Twitter addict? That is just an extremelly rediculous amount of subscriptions.
The keyword here is Following, note the last three letters in that word - ing. This bit seemed to have been overlooked in the initial outcry of Twitter…ers;
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.
Source: http://blog.twitter.com/2008/08/making-progress-on-spam.html
Even I, a completely ignored micro-blogger, has gotten a few of this ‘Follow spam’ from time to time. You know its done by computer when they target me, eh?
The thing that bugged me about this was not about Twitter itself. It was the reactions, specifically those in the Digg story. Case in point, people are already asking for an alternative to Twitter. Do people these days really think they are going to need that 80 pages of lunch menus? Now, I understand how the web goes, and when Twitter got big, the idea got big. When the idea got big, the internets were flooded with copy-cat programs.
Personally, the thing I think that Twitter has going for it is the API behind it, and how more than any other platform, it has been put to good use. Like the iPod, the fact that it is so popular (not neccessarily the best) means that more companies can afford to opt for compatability. The only real problem with Twitter is, anyone who has used Twitter for more than a fortnight has become well aquainted with the Twitter whale, aka: the picture they show when Twitter is down. So now, in an apparent flood of fed-up-ness, the blogosphere is debating and arguing and hish-hashing about where to go now.
Ping.fm is where you go, dang nabbit. I feel a definate feeling of ease in hard times like these. Why? Because I simultaneously post to Twitter as well as all (or most) of the aforementioned copy-cat programs, via Ping.fm. And I must say from personal experience, doing everything really simplifies the task of doing something. What I mean to say is that this rather intelligent cap on Twitter has, of course, sparked the debating in a few posters. And with that we are starting another micro-blogging-war.