Twitter: Following More Than 150 People? Big Head!

Follow Friday #1

By: Stephen Bray

I haven’t thought lots about Twitter recently. I haven’t been using it – or so I thought?

There have been lots of reasons for this. Firstly a busy business and family life reduces the time I can devote to Twitter, which can be a distraction.

Secondly, I find that once I’m following more than a few hundred people it becomes difficult to relate directly to most of them. British anthropologist Robin Dunbar theorized that “the limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size and relates to all human relationships, not just Twitter. If you have a respectable neocortex you may even be able to relate to as many as 150 people.

Twitter: Faster Than CNN?

CNN
Image via Wikipedia

By Stephen Bray

It’s half past six on a cold morning in Birmingham U.K. Professor Scott Lucas from the Department of  American Studies at Birmingham University is already listening to the sonar like ping of Tweetdeck.

Lucas is, in addition to being a busy department head, and the author of a number of books and articles on U.S. Foreign Policy. He is also the Editor in Chief of ‘EA Worldview’, a blog that is regarded as seriously as any printed political journal.

Breaking news can up your follower count!

Interesting to see the increase in followers that @jkrums got yesterday. He was allegedly the first to post pictures of yesterday’s Hudson River plane crash, and a massive 1949 of you decided to follow him – followed by another 132 today at the time of writing.

Stats from the fantastic TwitterCounter.

Update: Rory Cellan-Jones has posted more about this story, and how twitter is changing the way journalists report here.

Repost: Twitter faces the gallows by limiting unauthenticated API requests

Great post by TK Kirchner over on Blorge regarding Twitter shooting itself in the foot by limiting API requests.

Rather than rehash it, I’m posting the first paragraph here and you can click over to Blorge to read the rest.

Twitter faces the gallows by limiting unauthenticated API requests Twitter has been trying to stay afloat in the mist of overwhelming traffic for quite some time now. They’ve disabled features, like reply tabs and instant messages, and even tried to reduce authenticated API requests, from unlimited to 70 to 20 and back up to 100. Now, they’re placing a limit on unauthenticated API requests, moving it down to 100 requests per hour per IP address. Developers are already complaining that such move is going to cause serious problems for their businesses and, in effect, cause problems for Twitter.

Are you a whore?, Guide to twitter, ruining your career and more!

Good morning Twitter campers – a fairly hefty roundup this morning as lots of news and views coming in by email as well as on our twitter radar!

  • Twitter Status keeps us updated on the ..ummm… status of Twitter – good if you’re intersted in stats and figures – and pretty little graphs :)

Andrew Grill is using Twitter for business – are you?

Like many people that hear of Twitter, at first Andrew thought of it as a waste of time, and wondered what all the fuss was about.

But, give him his due, he signed up and gave it a go, wanting to (in his words) ‘walk the talk’.

His blog today shows that 6 months on, he’s certainly glad he did!

He says:

Twitturly – what are people tweeting about

Titturly

Fab collection service that scans people’s Tweets and then pulls them together to find out which URLs are being talked about the most on twitter.

Absolutely great for finding out industry trends and current thoughts.

As of today (19th June) big news is Stewart Butterfield’s yahoo resignation letter, which has been doing the Twitter rounds.

http://twitturly.com/

It’s a Twitter Twaffic Explosion!

According to this, traffic to Twitter nearly doubled between Februdary and April 2008.

An interesting article from compete blog looks more indepth at Twitter and it’s reach.

They say:

  • Twitter users are 10% more likely to be male than the average internet user. This skew is nearly identical across all three Usage groups.
  • Twitter skews heavily towards the college/twenty-something crowd. Twitter attracts 18-24 year-olds at nearly twice the rate of an average U.S website.

I'm happy to use Increase Sociability.