So far, I’m a little unimpressed with the leading contender for a collective noun for ‘those people I follow/am following on Twitter,’ which appears to be ‘tweeple‘. To my ears, it’s rather silly, and a rather glaringly obvious portmanteau.
Myself, I’d much rather reappropriate an already existing bit of slang, and mash together ‘people’ and ‘tweet’ into ‘peeps‘. It’s already culturally (more or less) accepted slang, is already being used to denote a group of people (“my peeps”), and as a nice little bonus, is also onomatopoeia for the chirp (or tweet) of a smallish bird, so it fits right in with the general theme of Twitter.
So you all can go on with your bad selves and your ‘tweeple.’ Me, I’m going to be hanging with my peeps!
(And on a slight tangent: I’d be amused if, since Twitter imposes a limit of 140 characters for tweets, they also imposed a 140 ‘character’ limit for your contacts. Not sure if that should work out as 140 followers and 140 followees [280 total contacts in both directions], or 70 each, or perhaps just 140 total allowed and spread them out however you wish. Realistically, best would be a limit to only following 140 ‘characters’, but allowing for an unlimited number of followers [so that organizational Twitter accounts like Twitterific or high-profile personalities like Wil Wheaton can still be followed by all those who want to]. Of course, this version of the 140 character limit won’t happen, but it works in my head. Really, how many individuals can most people really keep track of full-time?)