After reading about Twitter’s new “Suggestions for You” tool, I finally got a chance to see it in action – for those of you who haven’t heard of it, “Suggestions for You” provides a list of people who you might want to follow using an algorithm that explores your existing friends.
In typical Twitter fashion, it’s no frills. It provides a person’s bio, a list of your friends who follow them, and the option to “follow”. So, I decided to follow Chris Arsenault, a venture capitalist with iNovia Capital in Montreal.
Bottom line: A much-needed feature given the importance and challenging of finding new people to follow. It will appeal to many Twitter users but it does not have as much information about potential new friends as Mr. Tweet.
Rating: 7/10
More: Here’s a TechCrunch post on why “Suggestions for You” is so signficant. MG Siegler described it as “massive”, which is a little over-dramatic.
3 Comments
I think this seems like a great feature, we'll see how it pans out. I like the fact that others may follow me due to suggestion, and i like Twitter doing some of the leg work and finding me people I might want to follow. So far it seems win-win! God bless!
The algorithm worked a lot better for you than for me. Maybe Twitter is more subtle and intuitve than I realized. I hope not, because it would imply that I'm very boring. These are the "Suggestions for You" that I received:
a nice woman who works for Google in Australian, we had played with a few Google Waves recently
1) IBM Datapower
2) Bill Gates (roll my eyes and sigh: Bill has fewer than 10 extant Tweets, last time I checked. Most recent was a year ago, about what he ate for lunch, to a family member)
3) Wikileaks
4) U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
5) Matt Cutts
6) a web developer in Bangalore, India
7) a person with no profile from Vietnam
9 – 12) several data visualization and quantitative analysis related businesses or columnists, which were on-target for me, as I'm a statistician.
How "massive" was that, M.G. Siegler? I prefer Mr. Tweet.
Twitter just needs to provide a way to turn it off. I don't care how many followers I have, nor do I wish to follow more than a few. I quit Facebook because they were always shoving suggested users down my throat. It the mean time, I've added the following filter to my adblock plus plug-in to Firefox. At least now I don't have to look at them:
twitter.com##div#recommended_users