The story so far,  http://bit.ly/bKzLXl (read from the bottom)

It’s been 3 days since I last updated and I now have 1,643 followers, up almost 400 since then, I am following 1644, and therein lies a bit of a problem.It’s not insurmountable, but it involves a bit more effort on my part.

As is stated in the original article that started me on this http://bit.ly/bkgaz6, once you follow 2,000 people you can’t follow any more until 2,000 people are following you back. There is some flexibility to this rule, it appears to be ±10% but it’s not really clear, certainly not in Twitter’s “following rules and best practices” (http://bit.ly/9AdDaP) where it states “Once you’ve followed 2000 users, there are limits to the number of additional users you can follow: this limit is different for every user and is based on your ratio of followers to following.”

I have no problem with this rule, and indeed I doubt most people are aware of it, nor would they care if they were made aware of it, the thoughts of following that many people is insane for almost everyone I would think.The rule is there to stop spammers (it’s also against the rules to follow more than about 1,000 people a day, send more than 250 DMs a day and many many more things all referenced on Twitter’s “About Twitter Limits (Update, API, DM, and Following)” http://bit.ly/9BydqN 

The problem I have now though, is that I follow lists of 500 people at a time, I can’t do that any more. I need to follow smaller lists, and also to prune the “deadbeats” more diligently . Following progress may be a bit slower over the next few days, although I would reckon 50 a day is easily achievable.