That said, I’m probably getting close the have a cap to the amount of people I can follow. Why? Well, I don’t use tools that separate people into groups. Twitter apps like Tweetdeck, Seesmic (and others I’ve never tried) allow you to follow your friends and group the people you follow into logical columns so you can track certain accounts together.

I used to use this approach… I had a column in Tweetdeck for people I follow who tweet about Sports, Business, Design, Web Development, “Good Friends”, etc and a few saved searches – mostly related to Spoke or our clients. But I gave up Tweetdeck and the column approach altogether. Why? Two reasons — One was a problem I had with links in AIR apps and the second I didn’t realize until was a problem until I started using Tweetie for Mac: I wasn’t interacting with a lot of people.

See using these columns I was virtually ignoring the All Friends column.  I was interacting with the same people over and over again and unless I added the account to one of those columns when I started following it, I would most likely not see any of their tweets.  I didn’t even realize that I was doing this until I switched to Tweetie.

Tweetie is a one-column application (a la – All Friends column in Tweetdeck) and after I started using it, I noticed that I read (or at least skimmed) through the tweets in the stream (when I’m on twitter, I don’t worry about trying to catch up when I’m not). After a while I noticed I was interacting with more and more people. Making new friends, unfollowing people who spammed my tweet stream. Life is good.

I found one draw back to this approach — I’ll run into a maximum number of people I can follow. I’m right around 1,000 now, and I’ve decided to start removing people from the list if they are tweeting the same thing alot or if they are business bots that just tweet blog posts, etc.

My Advice: Find Your Approach

I’ve talked with people each with different points of view about how many people to follow. Some only want to follow 100 people so they can keep up, other’s don’t care and just pick and choose what they pay attention and some people care about their follower numbers, so they follow everyone.

I made a comment on Mark Murnahan’s blog post about the following / unfollowing trend about my approach and his reply was that the communication matters less than the approach. He’s right, he also follows 18,000 people, something that I’ve come to realize I probably never want to do. It’s just not me… I want to interact with a large majority of the people I follow. I want to follow people who’s tweets I care about reading, and I want to actually read them.  That’s the twitter approach that works for me. Make sure to find the way it works best for you.