Stop Twitter Spam

It’s amazing how quickly bad information travels on the internet. Yesterday there was a very big misconception about Twitter’s new follow limits spreading around the blogosphere. Here’s the chain of events:

• Brent Csutoras wrote a blog post called Twitter Limits Following to 2,000. He came to this conclusion based on his personal experience with follow limits. He also has a friend who had a similar experience with a limit at 2,000. So far this is accurate, although someone skimming the headline might come to the conclusion that Twitter has imposed a hard limit at following 2,000 which is not the case (Twitter says that the limit is not the same for everyone and it will change based on behaviors).
• The news about a follow limit of 2,000 picked up steam with this blog post by David Risley: Twitter Marketers and Gaming The System, which linked to Brent’s post. Like Brent’s blog post, there were no major inaccuracies here but David’s choice of words on his link - ‘Twitter now has a 2,000 follower limit‘ could easily be misconstrued by someone who scanned the link and didn’t click through for the details. Remember, Brent had a problem with following more than 2,000 people, not with having 2,000 followers. More on that later in this blog post.
• Later in the day, Dave Winer wrote a post called Twitter limiting followers to 2000. From Dave’s blog post: “Just read in various places that people are getting messages from Twitter saying that there’s a limit of 2000 followers per account.” His sources were Brent and David’s post and a discussion on FriendFeed started by Louis Gray. This is where the major inaccuracy really started, although it’s easy to see how Dave came to this conclusion if he keyed in on David’s choice of words when he linked to Brent’s post. I still love ya Dave.
• Om Malik used Dave Winer’s inaccurate post as the source for his post on GigaOm: Twitter Limits Followers to 2000? This headline was later changed to the current headline: ‘Ev Williams: Twitter Not Limiting Followers’
• By now, all of this has gotten on to TechMeme. So it must be true, right?
• Robert Scoble started this discussion on FriendFeed: “I’m seeing that Twitter is limiting people to 2,000 followers. That sucks. I tried to get you all over to scalable FriendFeed.” There are dozens and dozens of comments on this thread, with the usual declarations that these limits signal the downfall of Twitter.

Shortly after Om’s post, Twitter co-founder Ev Williams went into damage-control mode. He sent out a tweet telling Om that his information was wrong and left this comment on Om’s blog post.

Om, I’m afraid this has gotten confused. There is no limit to the number of followers you can have.

There is a limit to the number of people you can *follow*. This is mostly to reduce spam and depends on a number of factors. More details here: (link)

As I mentioned, earlier Om later updated the his blog post to reflect Ev’s clarification.

Biz Stone has also tweeted about the inaccuracy:

folks, you can have as many followers as you want—there is no limit on your Twitter popularity potential

As of the writing of this blog post (9:40 am PST on August 12th), Dave Winer has not corrected his blog post yet. Hopefully he will update it soon. Already there are thousands of people who got the wrong information from three A-List bloggers and I highly doubt that those people have seen the corrections from Ev and Biz. I have a feeling that Twitter will be fighting this rumor for weeks. Don’t believe me? Just do a search on 2000 follower limit and look at how many people consider this to be a fact.

And all of this points to a need for Twitter to improve their communications about these follow limits. Right now they are sending very mixed signals. Are the limits there to control spam or help with system performance. If the limits are dynamic then why are so many people hitting the limit at 2,000? And why do the limits exclude some people - e.g. Leo Laporte’s TwitLive account?

Update:
Dave Winer has written a new post acknowledging the error in his original post.  David Risley has also written a follow-up post making it clear that the limit is on following, not followers.