Today Robert Scoble blogged about some new proposals for charging a premium for people who follow lots of people on Twitter. He rejects the idea and disputes the claim that users such as himself, Lea Laporte, or Jason Calacanis put more “strain” on Twitter’s system.
I’m not even going to attempt to get into that discussion because none of us really know exactly how screwed up the situation is with Twitter’s architecture. Based on blog posts like this from Twitter’s developers we know that they have work to do to turn Twitter into more of a true messaging system.
I actually like the idea of Twitter charging a premium for people who follow a large number of people because this would be a huge spam deterrent. Right now spammers are having a free lunch and Twitter (and indirectly, the Twitter community) is picking up the bill. There is absolutely no barrier whatsoever to following as many people as they they’d like in an attempt to get people to click through to their web site, either from their profile page or from Tinyurl’s that lead to a splog or a web site loaded with affiliate links.
The fact that most people are ignoring or blocking these spam users isn’t the issue. The issue is Twitter’s system resources getting chewed up by the mass-following activity (using bots scraping the public timeline or cloning following lists from popular Twitterers like yourself), not to mention all of the blocking activity that results from people getting rid of these annoying spammers. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of this mass-follow activity was the culprit or at least contributed to some of the recent Twitter outages.
Charging a premium would be a huge deterrent against the spammy mass-follow behavior. I might be wrong on this, but I think very few spammers would continue trying to squeeze click-through’s from Twitter if they had to pay for the privilege of following thousands of people.
I want to make it very clear that I’m not calling Robert Scoble a spammer (or Jason or anyone else who follows thousands and genuinely interacts with their followers) because he is following lots of people. I’m referring to the bots that start following 10K people in one day and run on auto-pilot (auto-posting tweets). With that said, I do think that these guys are getting a massive amount of publicity out of Twitter and, as a result, should be supportive of the pay model. I know that Jason is supportive of this as long as it guarantees him better uptime. Robert, would you reconsider your position on this if this resulted in less spam on the system?
Update:
I want to clarify that I think people should be charged for following lots of people, not for being followed by lots of people. So under this model, someone like Leo Laporte, who is followed by over 37,000 people but is only following 437 would not pay as much as Robert Scoble, who is followed by fewer people (25,284) but is following over 21,000.
