Twitter; you follow HOW MANY people? (NWR)

It's OK if I blog about something other than my writing right? (NWR - Not Writing Related)

I need just say, what is the point in following 54,000 people on Twitter? I see these huge numbers on people's twitter accounts and when I find a famous person, I don't blink when I see that 300,000 follow them, but when I see that anyone follows more than a few hundred people I start to wonder how they could possibly find Twitter useful with the volume of tweets that would be coming though.

Face it, the truth is you really CAN'T follow more than a few hundred (For me personally more than 50 would be crazy) because you are not actually following them. Sure they're coming through your feed and perhaps you're even casting your eye over some every now and then but the mental filter for stuff that's important has to kick in at some point and your eyes skip over the ones you're not interested in.

If you follow 1000 people who each tweet once a day, you're getting 41 tweets per hour of the day. If you sleep for even 6 of those hours, you're getting 62 tweets every WAKING hour. About 1 per minute.

If you however follow 54,475 people (like Stephen Fry does... but am sure many others with similar numbers) and every person tweets once a day you're getting about 5 tweets every 6 seconds. It takes about a second to read a tweet so that's all you would ever have time to do.

So lets face it, YOU don't follow that many people, your account does. It's nice and all - and having lots of followers is a great thing...

but if someone who follows over 1000 people already decided to follow me as well, I wouldn't be that flattered.