

Twitter's Golden Ratio (That No One Likes To Talk About) - cruise02
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/26/twitters-golden-ratio-that-no-one-likes-to-talk-about/

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far33d
My biggest pet peeve about twitter right now is how little useful information
they provide when you get a new follower via the notification emails.

How about "people you follow in common" or people "who follow both of you"?
How about a digest of their last 10 tweets?. Some of this data you can't even
get on the site.

They barely hit the minimum bar for a social network.

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cruise02
I've only used twitter for a few weeks, but I very quickly got to the point
that I just delete the notification emails without reading them. They don't
have any content at all beyond the notification that there's a new follower,
about half a bit of information.

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bhousel
Twitter actually does have limits on the number of people you can follow. You
can follow up to 2000 people penalty free, but above that, you need to have
enough followers to justify following any more. From my tests, it seems like
the ratio is around 1.1 follows allowed for each follower that you have.

I agree with the article that even 2000 follows is an absurdly high number.
One person can't keep up with all the chatter. But for many business accounts
it makes sense to be able to keep track of what your fans are saying (and I
mean legitimate companies, not the SEO experts and marketing gurus that are
taking over twitter).

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zacharypinter
The main reason I look at ratios is to try to quickly identify a spammy follow
versus somebody generally interested in my tweets (perhaps they're a friend of
a friend, or were searching a keyword I recently tweeted about).

If twitter had a better way of preventing spam follows, then I think this
would be much less of an issue.

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llimllib
Almost everybody I know has approximately equal followers and followees. I
block or don't follow anybody whose ratio is not ~= 1.

EDIT: "know" should read "follow"

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spot
why wouldn't you follow someone who has more followers than followees? i
follow about 20 folks and am followed by 400. those 20 already tweet so much i
am not sure i want more traffic than that. what does that say about the
quality of my output?

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llimllib
You're making the mistake of assuming a universal "quality of output"
function. I have no problem with people following many less or more people
than follow them, in my experience they're just not the type of person I like
to interact with on twitter.

I'm just sharing the way I use twitter, not making a claim about how
anybody/everybody should use it.

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spot
We hear that's not what you want. What we are asking is _why_?

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spot
Perhaps what you are really saying is you don't follow people who don't also
know you, ie with whom you have a two-way relationship?

