I've been using Twitter for a while now and I've noticed that some active Twitter users are following more than a couple of hundred people. This makes no sense to me. On your Twitter homepage, you get all the various tweets from the people you follow. Let's say you are following 400 people and each of them tweets about once or twice a day. That's 400 to 800 tweets -- the homepage only shows about 20 or so. How can one actually believe they are keeping in touch by following that much people?

 

Not only that, but (recent) scientific studies have shown that our brain is hardwired to be able to interact with about 150 people. This may be a little less or a little more, but in general I agree with the principle of not being to able to interact with over a double of that number. If we try to keep in touch with much more than that, chances are you are neglecting some people completely, pay less attention to others, and eventually only focus on a select group of people. Not only that, certain companies are now coining terms like MySpace burn-out, social burn-out, etc. because a lot of users of social websites are experiencing tremendous stress trying to keep up with their friends.

 

How about yourself? Do you use any social "web 2.0" websites? Do you experience stress trying to keep up with them all?