(hat tip to ZDNEt and Chris McEvoy for the lead)
From ZDNet:
“With no notice, Twitter yesterday “pulled the rug out from under its developers” one developer says, by discouraging auto-following and imposing 1,000 person-per-day following limits.”
Now… this is not news to me because of the “pulling the rug out from under its developers” thing or the 1,000 person-per-day following limit… The news to me as a Twitter user… I don’t really remember getting a message or alert that the new limits were going to be enacted. I use Twitter on a daily basis. It seems fairly odd that I would not know about the change.
Other than me having a selfish ego trip… what do I really think about the change?
I think it is excellent that Twitter is keeping people from using an Auto-Follow feature. It adds personality into a website that is growing by leaps and bounds and has the potential of turning into another worthless spam whore. By keeping people from auto-following each other you force people to really think about who they are connecting with, which in my mind makes the site more valuable.
What do you think about the change?
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Stuart Foster
About time… Really glad Twitter decided to crack down on the spammers. Individual interaction is what Twitter is all about and the Click my Junk type people were ruining it.
Lynn Miller
I totally agree with you…thanks for pointing this out. I had not heard about this either!
Kris Bovay
Glad to hear it. Auto following does not 'fit' with the Twitter vibe. Not sure about the 1000 per person day limit. I'll wait and see what the impact is on the conversation.
TaVona
I agree 100% I use Twitter as a way to spread my message of success and prosperity, but I actually look at who I'm following and I hate when people auto-follow me, just so they can try to sell me a bunch of stuff.
Sardar Mohkim Khan
I agree with that.. The idea of having people add you just for the heck of it bothers me a lot. The idea of 'returning favor' is just plain stupid at Twitter, which as you state might become a spam whore..
Richard Cunningham
I can't see a legitimate reason to follow more than 1000 people per day or even 50 per day (if not auto-follow). It would be good if I could get statistics on how many people a new follower has followed that day.
Auto-follow I think is a difficult issue because people like to think they are being followed back, but in reality they are probably either ignored (via groups) or lost in the noise for popular people.
kylelacy
@Richard I don't know if people enjoy the Auto-Follow anymore. You can usually tell when someone is using an auto-follow feature because you receive the follow alert right after following them. No creativity in that one. 🙂
Thanks for the comments everyone. Sounds like we are all on the same page!
Jesse Stay
The issue here is Twitter still hasn't specifically said they don't want users auto-following, or developers writing for it. We need a clear definition so we can decide where our roadmap will be.
Nancy Williams
I completely agree. Twitter is a way for you to form a relationship with someone, but you can only really do that if you take the time to see who they are and decide whether you want to embark on that relationship.
Auto-following simply encourages people to use Twitter as little more than another marketing outlet. I follow people because they have a personality and something interesting to say which I want to hear, not because I want to be marketed to.
Chuck Lasker
The only people who used auto-follow were newbies who didn't understand the down side, and spammers. The next thing they need to do is not let people Tweet until they have uploaded an avatar and entered more than 30 characters in their bio. Following limits should not be arbitrary, as they are now – they should be on a graduated scale. You can't follow more than 10 people a day your first 3 days, then 30 a day for 7 days. Then, you can't follow more than 5 times the number of Tweets you've sent, including replies. At least something like that which allows participation but knocks out spam-bots.
Brad_Hart
I disagree with notion that the only people who use auto-follow were noobs and spammers. It actually works quite well when you are setting up temporary groups like I did at ComicCon. We were able to quickly disseminate info and pass it along to others in the group. I know of a few people who did the same thing at the Consumer Electronics Show. The feature had its legitimate uses
Chuck Lasker
Interesting. That is something I hadn't ever heard of, but makes sense. Thanks – I learned something new.
Brad_Hart
They have been saying that autofollow was going away since late last month, so this isn't really news. I am glad to see it finally implemented (mostly).
I am personally glad they haven't limited the number of people who could follow you in a day since that has also been floated around in the rumor mine field.
@richard c There are plenty of reasons why you might want to follow 1000+ people in a day, I often times follow a few hundred new people every #followfriday and usually watch them over the weekend to get a real feel for how they tweet. Granted by Monday or Tuesday I usually drop most of the new people, but that is beside the point. I could easily get to the point where I watch a 1000+ new people on #FollowFriday.
This isn't the only place where the limit could hurt. I had a special group setup last year at a couple of conventions that easily had me following 2000 people back in a single day. This is also where autofollow was hand and legitimate. I suppose by the time DragonCon and ComicCon come around this year and at the very least South by Southwest hit next year I will have a new system worked out.
Jesse Stay
Brad, they never said users couldn't auto-follow. They said they were removing their own internal auto-follow program. There is still nothing that says you can't auto-follow, nor are they actively stating you shouldn't do it. There's nothing clear on this – they need to come out, one way or another on whether it's against their terms of service or not. Especially for developers writing these apps.
brad
true enough they didn't forbid autofollow via outside sources, but the do have a habit of deleting/suspending accounts that use outside autofollow services. I didn't think this was true until I setup a couple of test accounts to try it.
Jesse Stay
That has nothing to do with auto-follow though. That has to do with people trying to game the system, and follow too many people in a short amount of time in order to get more followers or spam. Twitter will never suspend your account just for following people back that follow you.
Brad_Hart
You are missing the whole point of it though. They removed the feature from their own features because they felt it was a bad service and soon enough they will likely restrict or completely make it impossible for you to do likewise from outside of twitter as well. Twitter rarely tells you anything is against the rules, which is why you have many people getting suspended for reasons they don't understand.
I know for a fact they they have suspended heavy usage accounts who use autofollow on outside services whether or not is has anything to do with spam or not. I have witnessed it happen and even went so far as purposely do it to prove it happens. Believe it or not, it is up to you.
Jesse Stay
The point is they were not suspended because they used auto-follow, but instead by the way they used the service. I have thousands of people on my service that use auto-follow just fine – only those that aggressively follow or do things out of the ordinary have issues.
I don't recall seeing anywhere Twitter saying developing auto-follow services was a bad practice and discouraged from their platform. I think that's the issue and Twitter needs to be much more clear if they don't support the practice.
Brad_Hart
Autofollow is only as aggressive as those who decide to follow you, and anyone can get screwed by simply becoming popular.
Brad_Hart
Autofollow is only as aggressive as the people following you. If you end up with a thousand people following you in an a hour you follow a thousand people in an hour. It is that simple.
ChrisAldrich
I'm personally glad they'd be implementing something like this and wish they had done it about a month ago. Eventually without any controls the site would have become a waste land. In the spirit of using it as the tool it has become, they needed to implement changes like this as the site scaled up to more and more people. It's very similar to the changes they instituted in the fall of 2008 when they created a cap of being able to follow more than 2000 people when your own number of followers wasn't commensurate with that number. As a game theorist, I'm sure that people will somehow find some other way to artificially game the system.
As a separate note, who really wants to waste the time building thousands and thousands of followers when none of them are really going to ever pay attention to you? Yes, it 's great to have a high number, but really what is your ultimate reach? How many people are you engaging?
chucklasker
I wrote an article about the whole fallicy of Twitter followers. http://twurl.nl/r47sno
richardchang222
Recently, I found a good twitter auto follow service which make the followers increased fast, that is http://www.fastautofollow.com/, it's very convenient to get lots of followers.