Twitter Friend Averages (POLL)

I haven’t talked about it much (or at all) on my blog, but I’ve been developing a Twitter application for the past few months.  Every time, I think I’m done, my intrepid beta tester, HighTechDad, does what any good beta tester should do.  He finds where my application is severely lacking, sending me back for some furious code-rewriting sessions.  My latest versions seemed to work well enough for my Twitter username, but I ran into a problem when I attempted to "stress test" the application by running it through guykawasaki‘s name.  The web server runs out of memory trying to process the 100,000+ people he follows.

I was trying to think of a way around this, but then I thought: Perhaps it is best not to.  Perhaps Guy is such an edge scenario that I would be better off pulling the first 5,000 he follows and leaving it at that.  Not to give too much away, but my application is intended to analyze your following list in the hopes of finding more people for you to follow.  So the audience is most likely not someone already following over 100,000 people, but people following 1,000 or less people.

This led me to question what is the average number of people that Twitter users follow.  Is it 500?  1,000?  5,000?  More?  Less?  To help me answer this, please answer the following poll.  It is easy to determine how many people you follow.  Just stop by your Twitter page and note the number above "Following."  Then choose the answer in the poll that best matches how many people you follow.  NOTE:  Do not use the number above "Followers."  I’m not looking for the number of people that follow you.  I’m looking for the number of people that *YOU* follow.

[poll=2]