The Scobleizer says he’s following 17000 people.
How on earth can anyone process the Tweets of 17000 people if any more than 10% are saying anything interesting?
The problem with systems like Twitter is that they allow you to bypass the Dunbar Number which, to all intents and purposes, tell us how many people we can keep in our social networks in a very real sense. Our brains are simply not set up to be able to handle any more than that without data/context/relationship loss.
Now, if Roberts wants to come clean on how he manages relationships and updates with 17000 people on Twitter, 5000+ on Facebook and the umpteen emails and other methods of conversation that he receives without diluting the impact of the individual content.
I don’t mean to demean Robert but claiming on Twitter that you’re following 17000 people is akin to announcing to all of them that you’re mostly ignoring everything they say.
I just don’t think that’s polite or anything to boast about.
If you read Scoble diligently enough, (not something I recommend, as his writing skills are up there with Ace Frehley lyrics), you realize that a lot of the rep-boosting stuff he says is fascia. It’s not real, it has no meaning, but he needs the numbers to have a bigger tech-dick, and he needs the bigger tech-dick to maintain his rep, and he needs to maintain his rep to have any relevancy so that he can get paid.
So yeah, when he says “I’m following 17000 people” it means “I’m not interested in most of them, and the rest are just there for rep juice.”
In other words it’s a lie.