For my newbie blog readers, it’s good blog etiquette to re-post the link when someone makes the effort to feature you.

However… Ashton Kutcher is only following 149 people. Lance Armstrong has over 800K followers and he’s only following 71 people. Oprah has over one Million followers but she’s only following 13 people.

I’m sure the signal to noise ratio for Ashton, Lance and Oprah is pretty strong.

I’m also pretty sure that almost all of the people who are following them are genuinely interested in what they have to say.

On the other hand… @MufiHannemann is now up to 200K followers! Almost none of them even have a profile picture. LOL!

One of these days, Mufi will “pull his head out” and get real. At least I hope so. (He’s publicly embarrassing himself)

IMO – Its somewhat self regulating. If people feel that they went too far, then they can pull back or use a tool like Tweet Deck so help them manage groups or assign priorities.

Unless you’re publicly embarrassing yourself, I don’t believe it’s much of a problem. I believe its more of a personal preference.

But – You’re right – It’s about quality, not quantity.

I see some people going overboard but most people I’m following are following only a few hundred people.

OTOH, you said “People only follow who they think are worthy.” Which I think is not really that accurate these days for many people. Many in this latest iteration of Twitter especially (and evidenced in the extreme by the CNN v Ashton Kutcher contest) seem to be wanting to amass as many followers as possible. The automation tools (thanks to the beautifully open API) have really stretched the meaning of “relationship” though.

All of this robotic “follow me and I’ll follow you; unfollow me and I’ll unfollow you” – just seems like the same type of thing as the old link farms. It didn’t take Google long to figure out there was no value or true relationship in all that reciprocal linking.

I love people. I love the internet. I have made some incredible friends via Twitter and great business connections too. Twitter has a high noise to signal ratio. Communicating a business proposition in a relationship-based, conversational medium is an art. Mass reproductions just don’t have the same energy or impact – for me – a the original. Twitter is proving itself to be incredibly facile for creativity, and that’s the good news here I think.

I don’t see why it would. People only follow who they think are worthy.

“If everyone is offering a coupon, then a coupon is no big deal.”

I think coupons are cool as long as it’s a good coupon for something that I want to buy. The more coupons like that the better. Sometimes I’ll see a great coupon and buy an extra newspaper just so I can get a second one. All other coupons are invisible to me. I wish I could filter them out of the newspaper as easily as I can on Twitter.

If an offer is really compelling like when Oprah was posting a coupon for a free lunch at KFC, it went viral on Twitter, and it didn’t even originate on Twitter.

But yeah… anyone who believes in the philosophy of “Build it and they will come” when thinking about Twitter, might be disappointed. Even if you have a big brand, you still need to post stuff worth reading and promote something worthy of a RT once and a while.