On Saturday I found a great article written by Marshall Kirkpatrick titled “How Twitter’s Staff Uses Twitter (And Why It Could Cause Problems)” it is a fantastic read and covers some great insight and reveals the difference between the developers at Twitter Inc. and its millions of avid users.

Are Twitters Dev's ignoring their users?

So what is the difference?

The difference is that each of the developers at Twitter Inc. only tweet 2-3 times a day. Whereas the average number of tweets per day taken from a study of 1.6 million Twitter users was 4.422 (Study taken from Twitter Grader by HubSpot). The difference may look minimal but at best it shows that the development team at Twitter tweets 32%-55% lower than the average user.

Also a couple of weeks ago only 2 out of the 49 members of the development team were following 500+ people, Ev himself only following 1002 people. Which is drastically lower than thousands of Twitter users, which usually rack up to 1500+ and considering that they are the development team for Twitter, it is dismall.

Or is it? Let the debate begin!

In Marshall’s blog post he reasons that due to the lack of interaction and similarity of the development teams behavior on Twitter, in contrast to its user’s, Twitter’s future updates and improvements could be geared toward the development teams habits. This is a very important point and one that the development team should be very concerned with.

However does it make logical sense to follow thousands of people?

Twitter users may miss thousands of tweets per hour when they are away from the service. Therefore when they do check their tweets they are merely getting a luck-of-the-draw and potentially missing out on 1000’s of tweets. Although this may be true, unless you are on Twitter 24/7 or check every tweet since you last logged on with a Twitter client such as, “Tweetie” user behavior suggests they like it this way.

Has Twitter evolved into something its purpose was not intended for?

And could Twitter’s development team be leading the service down the wrong path if it continues keep itself aloof from the Twitterstream?

Ev Williams responded to Marshall’s post and I find the following quote very intriguing and very important to gain some aspect of the future use of the service.

A word from the CEO

Ev Williams: “As you know, there are lots of different ways to use Twitter. Many people fall into the trap that you should follow all or most people back out of a sense of politeness or so-called engagement with the community. But the fact is, having more followers does not give you more time in the day (as much as I’d like to sell that). At a certain point, you’re not actually reading any more tweets by following more people — you’re just dipping into the stream somewhat randomly and missing a whole lot of what people say.

That’s fine, but I believe people will generally get more value out of Twitter by dropping the symmetrical relationship expectation and simply curating their following list based on the information and people they want to tune in to.

I follow almost 1,000 accounts. Among these, yes, there are celebrities (because I’m interested in how they’re using Twitter as well as what some of them have to say). There are Twitter developers. (You mentioned a few I don’t follow — there are several that I do.) I try to follow all Twitter employees, some potential employees, industry leaders, friends, family, and other people I care about, people (or organizations) who make me smarter, or people who make me laugh. It’s hard to know if this is the *right* set of accounts to follow. And I’m constantly curating my list. (In fact, I’m now following @atebits since you pointed it out. Account discovery is something we need to work a lot on.)

1,000 feels to me currently to be about the right number — but I still miss a lot. And other people (like Biz and other folks in the company) are comfortable with a much smaller number because they don’t want to miss as much.

Also, keep in mind that a following list does not reveal, necessarily, what one is paying attention to. Hundreds of people give me feedback by mentioning @ev — which I check many times a day. I also have saved searches for “twitter” and other related terms.”

How do you use Twitter? Do you have thousands of followers? Do you think that following 1000’s of people gives you a greater or lesser Twitter experience? I would love to hear your comments below!

About the Author:  Rob Johnson is a freelance web developer who has a passion for online marketing. He is an Addy Award winner and currently teaches a New Media Strategies class at BYU-Idaho.