‘Who To Follow’ Feature on Twitter

I saw MG Siegler’s post this morning about a new ‘Who To Follow’ user search feature on Twitter. I opened the Twitter page and there is was:

Twitter was recommending two people I might want to follow and currently have not been. There is a ‘view all’ link that takes you to a second screen:

and on this screen the rationale (or part of one) as to why I might want to follow, say, Jolie O’Dell is presented in the form of other people that are following her.

This is going to turn out to have results much like the recommended users’ list: those that have lots of followers will be displayed more frequently, which will simply accelerate the power laws.

Now, I am assuming that the ‘recommenders’ — those whose names show up as followers of the suggested users — are people known to me, which makes it a social analysis at least. But I would have to know something about their algoritm to find out if it does more than that.

For example, I might be interested in following more people in the design world, and fewer professional writers. Or, more directly, I might not to see recommendations of people that I used to follow but no longer do. Or I may want to follow people that follow and are followed by people from very different social circles from me.

At present none of this possible twiddling is made accessible to us, but certainly Twitter could wander in that direction over time, making it a much more useful tool for growing your network. But even in this preliminary state, I see that it will lead to a surge in following behavior over the next weeks and months, and an especially big help to newbies.

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