As part of my ongoing research for my new hush-hush Twitter based enterprise I have been doing a lot of tweeting… an embarrassing amount actually. I’ve added Twits, sent tweets, re-tweeted and even researched Twiterati (its a new word for Twitter celebrity.. i know, i know). What started as just another part of my business model research has become somewhat of an obsession. And I’m glad about it, because if I can get obsessed with Twitter many, many others have yet to be converted and more Twits means more money in the long run for my start-up.

So back to the point, while  I was tweeting the day away and calling it ‘market research’ something awful happened! Something that sent me to bed distraught and left me awake for hours wondering “what did I do wrong?”. No I didn’t get dumped and nobody died, what happened was that I received a nasty little message from Twitter saying that I’d reached my following limit! Ah! For you non-geeks this is a crisis because, to the best of my knowledge, the whole point of Twitter is to accrue as many ‘followers’ as possible… and how do you do that? Well follow people of course! (Just to let you know, I realize this makes no sense and until I found a way to monetize on Twitter and their pushing of narcissistic ramblings I was very anti the whole idea, that is until I got hooked)

So when I couldn’t follow anymore I was bothered, deeply bothered… I mean celebrities have millions of Twitter followers and even random no-names have mass following no adays from just ‘branding’ themselves right, or being cute, or putting out wacky videos (see: iJustine). All i am asking for is my fair share! Well after some reading, soul searching and a few ‘reality checks’ from my friends I found out some interesting facts that the Twits at Twitter try to keep under wrap but are implementing to stop spam, harassment & ‘overly aggressive’ followers (like me!).

1. If you have less than 2000 people following you, you can only follow 2000 people. This ‘ceiling’ keeps Twits who have 100 followers from following 50,000 in efforts to inorganically boost their ratings.

2. Don’t follow more than 150 people in an hour and don’t make more than 150 updates from web, cell or PDA w/in an hour.

3. You can only send 250 DMs (direct messages) in any given 24 hour period.

4. Another restriction is that you can’t make more than 1,000 total updates per day, on any and all devices (web, mobile web, phone, API, etc. ) This means you can only follow, Tweet, add photos or video, etc. 1,000 times in 24 hours.

So what does this mean? Well besides me re-working my business plan it doesn’t mean a lot. For most of you over aggressive following and ‘courting’ of followers by messaging often isn’t a problem. But for me and others who are trying to jump on the runaway train of this new form of social media before its completely too late it carries weight. It just is making it harder to become a social media ‘elite’ and giving more power to those who are. My goal is to get 50k followers and I know it’ll take all of my creativity to do it but its possible with a little determination, a lot of persistence and fingers that never give up.

Are you on twitter? If so, follow me! (shameless I know…) And tell me about your experiences following, being followed or otherwise.