January 20, 1970
- Twitter Limits Followers To 2000? Going Fremium?
Dave Winer points to a series of discussions and blog posts about Twitter allegedly limiting people to 2,000 followers. In his opinion, it is a good idea, because "the expensive thing in Twitter is distributing status messages to large numbers of queues."
There is no official word from Twitter, and all this based on a couple of blog posts and status message. On their website, the only limits they talk about are: 1,000 total updates a day, 250, direct messages per day, and 100 API requests. If the San Francisco-based company is indeed going in this direction, it wouldn't be as hard to see them adopting a fremium model. A post on Statisfaction forums indicates that the follow limits are more recent and were prompted by the nefarious Twitter-spammers, but there are some on the Twitter forum who are unhappy about the limits.
In my blog post from May 2008 about their infrastructure problems, and how they can deal with it, I had suggested that they should limit the followers, charge for additional followers and messages.
$10 a month for 1,000 subscribers. 25,000 subscribers means someone like Scoble should be paying them around $250 a month. Let’s take it a step further. Twitter should limit people to 500 free messages a month. Any more should come in a bucket of, say, 1,000 messages for $10… This would also fit the Freemium business model that Twitter investor Fred Wilson so loves.
Anyway, that post got mixed reactions. Some agreed and others didn't much care for my proposed pricing structure.
Regardless, if this rumor is true, then this is a step in the right direction for the company as it helps them get a handle on their infrastructure and scaling issues.
