I see that people are talking about Twitter's obvious scaling problems - one of their developers, Alex Payne, said this:

The events that hit our system the hardest are generally when "popular" users - that is, users with large numbers of followers and people they're following - perform a number of actions in rapid succession. This usually results in a number of big queries that pile up in our database(s). Not running scripts to follow thousands of users at a time would be a help, but that's behavior we have to limit on our side.

Here's a thought: Facebook limited the number of friends you could have to 5000 - I suspect a lot of that had to do with scale worries. I suspect Twitter could go a long way towards solving their problems if they implemented a follower limit. Would it irritate people over that limit? Sure, but it might be better than this:

That pops up a lot in Twitterific, every day.

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