Comic Demetri Martin once had a bit on Jon Stewart that went something like, "I'm on Facebook (or MySpace or whatever); I've got 9,000 friends!"
Actually, he's up to 141,000 on MySpace (I'm closing in on 100 followers on Twitter :) ).
But for journalists, how many is too many for Twitter and Digg? And what types of friends do you want?
The Rules of Friending
Like me, Minjae Ormes, an online media consultant, seemed conflicted over what criteria to use in choosing who to follow on a social media platform. She said that it varies depending on the site -- she may be more strict with Twitter than on Facebook, for instance. With Twitter, she said the stream of tweets sometimes gets so cacophonous that she has to monitor her follow list to make sure it doesn't get out of hand, sometimes removing someone who tweets too much and then re-following him when his posts die down.
"Once I hit...around 400 people I followed, it was enough to say I know who I talk to on a regular basis, and I can afford to simply not follow back just because they follow me," she said. "Right now, my follower and follow list are within 30 people of each other, but it's not the same 800 people that I follow. It just kind of happened that I seek out people who are in new media, who are in fashion...or in film...and I'll follow them."
To tame the beast, so to speak, Ormes is constantly removing people from her follow list, so much so that it is almost a living document, a constantly mutating list that changes as she monitors the value of each friend and whether she's benefiting at all from seeing what they have to say.
As for Jessica Kositz, my most recent follower (though actually I've received several new follows since beginning this article), I chose in that instance not to follow back. She's not an anomaly for me; the distance between the number of people I follow and the number of people who follow me is constantly growing. Someone with Jack Bastide's friending philosophy might consider me arrogant or a snob.
For me, it's just simple mathematics: Every person I add is just another set of tweets that I'll have to scroll through to get to the ones I really want to read.