Twitter just decided to implement a new limit – the 1000 follows a day  rule. This new rule will affect everyone who follows new people on a regular basis. It will even affect those who just follow back their big lists of followers. So I decided to share what I’ve found out in this Marketing Tip.

What’s Wrong With This New Twitter Rule?

No one knew about it or that it was coming! It seems that Twitter admin did not have the common courtesy to report this new rule/limit to their loyal followers. This new feature was not even written about on the support section of the Twitter help blog till Monday, 4/20/09. That’s when Twitter officially announced that this limit is for real.

They say they are trying to optimize the follow limit for good Twitter people who auto-follow other people. What’s wrong with this picture? Everyone thought it was a bug. Yep, me too.

So… why did Twitter do this?

One reason could be that in the past few days Twitter has experienced a very slow performance from their servers. This could be from the 1 million auto-follows from @britneyspears maybe? Or it could be from the Kutcher/CNN faceoff! Maybe it’s happening just because everyone wants to use an auto-follow tool. Now, don’t get me wrong, the auto-follow feature of these 3rd party programs is very cool, so cool that everyone wants to have them. Face it, Twitter is becoming automated, it can’t keep up.

The Twitter Fail Whale probably doesn’t like all the bots/scripts, that people are using, picking on him. So… the more people who use these new automated tools, the more often the Fail Whale shows up. So Twitter admin decided… lets slow up the show! It’s probably a very good idea in actuality, but the worst mistake Twitter made was not to inform anyone about it.

The second bad idea that Twitter had was to just implement a dump restriction without first testing if it would be effective. It doesn’t seem like there is a real Google-like algorithm to it. There seems to be no genuine reason behind it that can optimize and help the experience of those Twittering. It also seems there is nothing good in it for the real big guys on Twitter. They are miffed!

So… WHY DID YOU DO THIS TO US TWITTER?

Maybe after thousands of  support tickets and millions of negative discussions on the internet the Twitter team will deactivate this limit or at least tell us how to optimize it for our own good. We can always hope.

What do all you Twitter fans think?

Was this the best idea that a big, super company like Twitter could have come up with? Was it fair to all the people who are loyal, Tweeting fans of Twitter? The ones who, like me, try to follow all the rules and use this great social marketing site as a tool to help build their marketing network.

Who knows what Twitter will come up with next. Maybe a link or RT limit? Scary stuff Twitter fans. Hope this Twitter Marketing Tip helped. I’d like to  hear your comments.