One of Twitter’s shortcomings is how difficult it can be to find good – and I use “good” loosely depending on your interests – to follow, although there are growing number of third-party services such as Mr. Tweet working making it easier.
Twitter’s response to the problem is something called the Suggested Users Page that – surprise, surprise – features A-List Twitter users – much like Google Reader’s recommendation tool features – surprise, surprise – A-List bloggers. So, what you get is A-Listers getting even more popular for no other reason other than they were popular in the first place.
While Twitter probably had good intentions with SUP, it has rubbed a lot of people the wrong way because it smacks of elitism. Dave Winer talks about this problem, citing how Ana Marie Cox went from several thousand followers to 60,000 because she appeared on SUP. Winer suggested SUP is a solid reason to break out from Twitter’s Walled Garden.
Let me be more blunt: SUP sucks. The concept doesn’t work because it’s completely subjective and arbitrary rather than inclusive. Twitter deems people within SUP as worthy of being followed but why these people as opposed to many others who are just as worthy – something Winer points out.
If Twitter is serious about getting into “business” of suggesting people to follow, it should walk way from SUP as soon as possible. Instead, it should embrace a better, more democratic methodology that takes into account things other than popularity or notoriety. As Mr. Tweet has demonstrated, there are better, smarter and more creative ways to recommend people to follow.
The sooner SUP disappears, the better.
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3 Comments
I rarely follow anyone unless I read their blog and think that they would have worthwhile tips.
Thanks,
Nate
I really would like Twitter to show recommendations as shown by Mr. Tweet. In fact, I have used Mr.Tweet and Twellow more than SUP to find people to follow. As pointed here, MrTweet is a pretty good recommendation service. I would personally recommend Twellow, because it categorizes people based on their profile Bio. This is useful because you can easily find people from your choice of category
When you target the eyeballs (and ad dollars) that Twitter folks have, the audeicne that thumbs the pages of People and US, you necessarily want to use more MSM celebrities as your draw. This is no longer tech or geek or SXSW. it's show business. It's a media property competing for ad dollars (soon) agains CNN and MSNBC and CNBC (StockTwits anyone?) And you (and I) are the soylent green content. Yeeha. Ain't life fun?!