If twitter can be anything one makes it to be, which IMHO is exactly the case, then perhaps the views in the above mentioned TechCrunch article would be myopic at best.

Twitter follower stat can mean various things. Regular users naturally know this for a fact. The quantity of tweets generated does not mean that tweets are becoming lower in quality. On the contrary, it breeds more quality on content developments for the overall internet, because now, there are more incentives for publishers and authors to produce quality contents. The quality and quantity of contents will grow. This can only be good for everyone.

When Google returns 6,250,000 results on "how to add followers on twitter?" it is rather meaningless. I barely browse more than 10 pages on any search, and if I do, it would reflect on the failure of the search engine to return quality results. In the same token, quality contents on Twitter would float. The difference with Google is that these quality contents float quite accurately in real time for Twitter, because it is driven by the most powerful cloud processing power on Earth - people.

I do not believe the founders of Twitter started up with the vision that it would evolve to what it is today. The early use of Twitter is very different to what it is today. The real question is whether today's Twitter is useful in solving today's problems? Just like how blogging evolved from its early "online personal diary" perception to what it is today, where businesses have taken center stage with the use of blogs, the same evolution is happening to Twitter. It isn't rocket science for Twitter founders to see this.

Removing follower stats does not generate quality contents. In fact, it will do just the opposite. Users who are using Twitter to tell their friends that "the M&M is now melting in their mouth" would naturally have a low follower count. These little tweets albeit how "meaningless" many observers have touted them to be, I can assure you they are still more meaningful than the millions of one-page try-out dead blogs out there, simply because friends are still in touch nevertheless.

Twitter's follower count is their most ingenius invention regardless of whether it was a carefully conceived game play or an accidental one. User's ego in wanting to build a high user count is really nothing to talk about. Just like in the real world, walking big-egos without depth of character are exposed when they open their mouth a little too much. They would not have many friends, much less followers.

Twitter must do what Google did, which is figuring out a way to to be really useful to businesses especially for marketing, which is one of the most important aspect of any businesses. Marketing and innovation are indispensible catalyst to each other.

The main reason Facebook is yet to generate enough revenue given their mega user base is directly related to the level of usefulness it represents for businesses. Users that search on Google are not registered yet they would easily number more than Facebook and play a direct role in Google's revenue strategy. Twitter should not be measured solely by their number of registered users. They have the same potential as Google on their search engine. I expect to see more powerful analytics developed for twitter by third parties. The potential is tremendous. I would probably write more about this in another post.

My point is, Twitter's follower stat is a major strategy that must not be taken away. A systematic breakdown would occur. Removing follower stat will lead to no more following stats, no more mini avatar display, no more linking with relevant people through browsing the following/follower links, no more stats for ratio analytics and as such, loosing that one glance judgement of sizing up a user profile. It would be a great loss of tons of useful statistics and data views, not to mention the overall reduction of user activities. Essentially, the entire Twitter ecology that is currently exploding would simply diminish into oblivion.