I’m a firm believer that Twitter has both a follow & tweet threshold which after crossed starts to diminish the effectiveness of the service. I believe it’s impossible for a user to adequately follow 300 plus Twitterers. If follows are posting a minimum of 4 tweets per day, that is over 1200 messages in one 24 hour period, far too many to create social dialog.

I smell fish anytime I see any Twitterer who is following 300+ users. Those individuals are likely “phishing for follows,” essentially following with the hopes to be followed. Arbitrarily, I believe a Twitterer starts to loose their ability to follow a community of users at around 150 follows, and it fully breaks down around 300 follows.

In just an informal survey of those I follow and respect, this number holds true.

@jasonfried – Following 55 / Followers 4643
@kevinrose – Following 122 / Followers 79,693
@randfish – Following 13 / Followers 3,213
@simplebits – Following 234 / Followers 9,781
@bfled – Following 172 / Followers 2,869
@copyblogger – Following 216 / Followers 9,532
@gruber – Following 252 / Followers 17,462
@davetaylor – Following 167 / Followers 3,656

While I’m having a hard time gathering numbers, I believe there is a certain number of Tweets which a follower will tolerate during the day. I’d love to see someone write an app to display the Tweets/Day on any user over a 30 day period. Anyone want to write that?

Speaking from my own personal experience if any of those I follow post more then 25 updates in one day, then I drop them like a bad habit. Not so much because I’m not interested but more to the fact that their constant updates begin to push down and out the others that I am following.

Regardless, I’m loving Twitter!