If you really want to get good value from conversations, keep them to less than 20 people round a dinner table. - Mark Littlewood

Interesting perspective in the smaller groups. I manage 3 twitter accounts and the latest I am only following 500 and it is the one I actually pay attention to the most because it was more select in terms of who I followed. You actually get to know people a little better per Mark's comment. - Lyn Graft

Mark: actually I found that a group of four is the best for conversations. Any more and the conversation starts to split and get distracted. - Robert Scoble

How many groups do you have Robert? - Lyn Graft

I'd call this account "justrobertscoble" :) I've read your post, sound practical. After we all tested twitter for two (some of us three) years, we understand that the more we follow people the more we get lost in tons of conversations, that I (for example) not even sure I'm interested in. I don't see how any of this will change without groups. It's just too much content to digest each day. (will, i can always unfollow people I guess) - Orli Yakuel

Lyn: just three. - Robert Scoble

Interesting. Um, I have a secret Twitter account where I follow key people I'm interested in my industry who share valuable links and relevant information that can be used to keep track of big picture trends in a focused way. However, I don't respond on it, just keep the signal to noise ratio high so patterns are more easily discernible. - Sally Church

So what I am hearing here from this conversation is twitter user base is inflated (I myself have 2 accounts). I however never felt the need to have 1000s of followers as most of the stuff is gibberish. I am following a very selected amount of people and I am very selective of the people that follow me. If I am engaged in conversation and I see that person that I value engaged in conversation I will look that person up and usually follow. So in the Atlanta community I have a tight knit twitter stream of what is going on in the tech arena. I have done this for security, sanity, and manageability. I don't blog so there is no reason for me to be that connected I have a day job. Great use case and nice experiment I hope it branches into something - Richard Gallo

I was thinking about this very topic today, I have consciously kept my follows as low as possible for since I started on twitter, but have recently been considering jumping on the wagon.... Now I have a secret twitter account and starting to ramp up the numbers to experiment. - Alistair (alpinefolk)

I love how you have Ijustine in your secret twitter group. I guess you need to keep up with all her valuable insights right? CaliLewis? - Mark

@mark - yes - those are some of the most amazing times, dinner, a small group of folks and some interesting conversation. :-) - Dan Morrill AKA Techwag

it is just become clear to me that you actually opened a group on twitter. and for that you needed to open another account, hmm... it's not easy to navigate between two accounts (even with desktop client) - Orli Yakuel

The maximum size of a group, in which you can "know" everyone, probably depends on the richness of the communication channel (bandwidth, opportunity for response, "liveliness" [real time?], etc). This reminds me of W L Gore & Associates lattice management approach and the way that, as business units grew, they would deliberately subdivide them to remain below of size limit of about 150, if I remember correctly. - John W Lewis

I hear the small group argument entirely. Very good point -- I hate big conferences since I feel like I have to say hello (and goodbye) to everyone for that reason. The networking events are even more difficult. You have friends who expect you to be with them during the evening but you also want to say hi to older friends and meet new faces. - Tamar Weinberg

This sounds like a few other business ideas: if you make a resource scarce, then everyone will want one. Or to put it another way: "There is a sucker born every minute" - How do _I_ get in ? :) - Ric Johnson

This is a bit off topic, but one that I think about everytime I visit your blog. Why is the Google connect bar at the bottom of your site and how do I prevent it from loading in my browser? - Davis Freeberg

Davis: I don't think you can prevent it from loading. I'm playing with Google Friend Connect to learn what Google is going to do to get into the social networking business. It's a little forum down there. - Robert Scoble

Sorry, I have to speak up along with Davis - it's positioned part-way down the page (and incompletely anyway) on my iphone. The last blog post page I tried keeps crashing Safari mobile (after a minute) each time I try it. - Micah Wittman

This reminds me of child 'rearing'. When I was much younger and my kids were little one of the things I learned when they would engage with multiple pals at the same time, still holds true today for me as an adult. Even numbers are always best with regard to interaction. Odd numbers and someone gets left out, like it or not. Pairing is natural, and I mean that literally. Multiples of 2 is always easier and more comfortable. To take that further, though, what happens when there are too many cooks in a kitchen? Nothing gets done. It's one of the reason I'm a staunch advocate of smaller networks. Good job Robert. I'm learning to appreciate you more and more. http://stardustglobalventures.com/2009... - Sheryl

weirdest thing on this one is I saw your "other" scoble account a while back, but thought it was someone else trying to mess with you in some way so never paid it any attention... :) - Jeremy Toeman

Curiously, given that "Really Secret Scoble" spells out RSS, this hasn't hit my RSS feed, and I happened to bump into it on FriendFeed. Ever since you made the changes to WordPress, there have been issues. - Louis Gray

I echo Jeremy as well. I thought it was a "Really Fake Scoble". - Louis Gray

Same here. Initial impulse was to DM Robert through FriendFeed to ascertain whether it was real. Then I thought, "Duh! Search FriendFeed!" - Hutch Carpenter

hmm... doesn't this just point to the lack of "groups" support in twitter!? I use @troynt greasemonkey script (http://userscripts.org/scripts...), which provides groups support among other things. - Shivanand Velmurugan

I've had two groups in both Twitter and FriendFeed for months now. One is called "Influentials" (which @scoble is part of) and the other "Cool-Friends" which are people who share similar interests or affinity. I always keep 3 tabs (one for all, the other two with these groups) and have gotten a lot of value out of that approach. On Twitter I have the lists as columns in Seesmic Desktop. - Jorge Escobar

honestly I do have multiple twitter accounts 4 different purpose, but sumtimes they do overlap, yes u r still the same person, but u r selling a brand, or a company or a non-profit or topics that r different. U need to keep track or straight. - polou/indigo_bow