Stop Twitter Spam

Aside from a recent post on the Twitter blog that didn’t include much detail, there hasn’t been any significant changes in Twitter’s controversial new following limits. While Twitter has stated on multiple occasions that the limits are different for everyone, many people are coming to the conclusion that new users can’t follow more than 2,000 people. And it’s very unclear now why these limits are in place. Are these limits in place to discourage spammers or are they there to minimize problems with system performance? Or both? If the limits are there to discourage spammers then why are so many non-spammers being impacted? The visibility of this issue has gone up a notch today with this discussion on FriendFeed and speculation that the follow limit might lead to a business model for Twitter.

Update:

It’s interesting how speculation about a following limit of 2,000 is quickly interpreted as fact in the blogosphere.   Here’s a new thread on FriendFeed started by Robert Scoble: “I’m seeing that Twitter is limiting people to 2,000 followers. That sucks. I tried to get you all over to scalable FriendFeed.“  It looks like Ev Williams is denying that there is a hard limit at 2,000.  His tweet is in response to a recent post by Om Malik.