Late this evening I found the above at the top of my Twitter page – a tweet from Bernie Goldbach, my esteemed partner in expatriate crime and @topgold on Twitter.

Now, 19 minutes is a very long time in the land of the fail whale, but the man has a toddler and a full-time job and needs his sleep. So I clicked over to @Scobleizer to double-check Scoble had indeed already achieved Twitter Nirvana – and saw that he had exactly 99,999 followers.

“Oh,” I thought. “Twitter has capped follow counts at the five digit ceiling. What a good idea.” And because it is a good idea (for all kinds of reasons) I clicked Follow just to test that there was indeed a newly implemented count cap.

And there wasn’t. And I became Robert Scoble’s 100,000th follower.

That was moderately amusing for about 30 seconds. What was far more amusing is that in the 30 seconds following this:

…I picked up 100 followers.

I’m sure these followers will depart shortly, for the same reasons I’m sure I’ll eventually un-follow the mighty Scoble (see FAQ). But it was interesting to observe first hand the flood effect of a high-profile Twitterer merely mentioning a @name – particularly now, when the concept of buying Twitter followers has so many people debating the raw value of pure numbers.

For what it’s worth, I’d advise any client who asked to flush the “Twitter procurement fee” directly down the toilet and consider it money well spent in preserving their credibility.

As for my own 30 seconds of Twitter fame, I’m happy to have these new people following me – it’s always nice to see numbers go up – but I’m not going to be mailing Scoble a cheque any time soon.

The FAQ (yes, already):

1/ OMG, you weren’t following Scoble?!

No. I like Scoble just fine, but Twitter is a social space for me and I limit the number of people I follow to 125. I can’t actually track and converse with more than that – an issue Scoble himself has addressed. I generally follow people I know and people with heavy design streams. When I feel the need for a dose of Scoble, I go read his blog.

2/ Holy SHIT you use the web interface for Twitter?!

Yes. I have tried and used a ton of Twitter apps, but the problem is that they all work. They conveniently push all my tweets to me in near real-time, and I don’t want that. I prefer pull over push for Twitter because it allows me to step into the stream when I have the time and attention for it. Realistically that is several times a day – just not all day.

3/ Do you get anything for being the 100,000th?

I wouldn’t have thought so, no. Since I wasn’t raised in a barn and am not a member of Generation Entitlement, I didn’t ask. If anyone is wondering, however, I would quite like a pony.