Should Twitter remove its follower count?

Of course they should NOT remove it! Like facebook, myspace, and real life, follower counts provide a huge service.

The number of followers is a really strong objective measure of an account's (or a person's) legitimacy.

How do you know the guy that added you on facebook isn't a spam bot? If he has 600 friends (or whatever is average in your social group), then he's probably legit. If he has 0 friends, he's probably not.

How do you know if the guy that's presenting you a business proposal is trustworthy? Based on the number of references or mutual friends or the breadth of his past experience (higher = better).

How do you know that THE REAL SHAQ is actually the real Shaq? Because 650,000 people have already verified it for you.

My point is that external opinions of people (or representations of people) are really important. The easiest way to verify this is to look at sheer numbers - "Tom has 20,000 followers. Mike has 1,000 followers. Therefore, I am risking less by following Tom" is sound logic. People don't have time to research every Twitter account they want to follow. Therefore, Follower Count is a really great way to convey legitimacy quickly.

NO!

Follower count is the only way to recognize spam/junk accounts. If someone follows 10k people and has 4 followers... obvious spam account.

I like how LinkedIn displays 500+ if you have gobs of network connections, and I doubt Twitter will do something like that.

Would it really remove any pressure to increase follower count? Presumably you could still see your follower count and who is following, and if you're trying to drive traffic or affect a conversation than you're still going to be trying to push it up. If you're feeling silly-competitive about follower count it might kill that irrational pressure, but I really doubt that's a major motivation for that.

The only maybe-positive effect I could see is that it might force readers to evaluate twitters based on content rather than joining a crowd of followers... but for organizations' twitters, that follower-count is often a good first-look evaluation as to how interesting it really is. Watching count also provides useful information about the rate of change of a person or organization's popularity.

i doubt they'll do it, competition helps them grow

Anyone who doesn't like the supposed pressure that exists to accrue more followers can use a Greasemonkey script to strip that data from their page views. I see no reason for them to enforce that preference on anyone else.

I am calling for all people to stop following both @cnn and @aplusk.

While a potent driver of early growth, it's just going to become a hassle and a distraction from actual use. (not unlike public friends lists on social networking sites)

I would love to see how this changes the usage of twitter. Maybe for the better.

yes, they should get rid of it.

YES!!!