Hi, Marshall. You bring up some interesting questions. 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. On the topic of developers, Biz and I aren't a fair gauge on whether the company is paying attention to them. We find them incredibly important, but we aren't able to pay enough attention to them, so we've hired people to do so full time. You'll find the @twitterapi account replying to developers all day long, for instance. And that's just one of our communication avenues. I hope this addresses your questions. Ev.
