Planet Lowyat

Twitter and Pownce fans please take noted.

Account limiting is apparently the new big thing to do in the world of Status Microblogging. Both Twitter and Pownce seem to have introduced limits to the number of people you can follow, and neither change seems to have come with much fan fare.

Pownce, similarly, seems to have engaged a 2000 person limit to the number of folks you can follow, as discovered by Leo Laporte earlier today. For once, though Twitter seems to have outflanked a competitor in terms of properly implementing new code as the new limitations on Pownce have apparently prevented Leo and others from even logging into their accounts to reduce the number followed to under 2000.

For those of you who aren’t avid users of Twitter (or those who feel more than happy with their usage of the system being limited to 100 or less followed): yes, Twitter can be useful and even invaluable to most of us without turning on an incessant firehose of tweets. But since Twitter can be such a momentous source of traffic and engaged readers to whatever website property you may be promoting, there are those who will go around and follow everyone they can find with the hopes that they’ll follow them back.

Of course, once they follow those folks back, they’re a captive audience to whatever it is they’re promoting. Fortunately, as we’ve discussed in the past, these system-abusers are generally pretty easy to spot - they’ve got about 20 people following their timeline and they’re usually following 10x or 100x that number. This has given rise to a whole new classification of Twitter gaming bots.

There are those I’ve talked to who’ve used, quite successfully, bots that will literally game the psychology of Twitter to induce folks to follow them. Experienced users of Twitter know when the aforementioned ratio of followers to followed is seen that it’s a spammer. To counter-act that, these Twitter friend-adding bots will automatically unfollow those who do not follow back within a certain time reference. Additionally, to increase the likelihood that they’ll follow in the first place, the system will track the public timeline and only add users based on pre-defined keywords that are relevant to what it is they’re promoting.

Twitter has made a very savvy move here in capping off the number of folks you can follow. I’d say there are generously about ten or fifteen folks that I think can legitimately handle all that white noise and process it using the system. The rest of the folks who follow in excess of 2000 people are either training themselves for when they’re able to directly plug into the Matrix, or they’re simply doing it for the purposes of appearing as if they’re listening (whether to gain followers’ respect or save face or game the system).

Source: Mashable