Twitter gets suggestive
By Dave Jeyes
The microblogging platform of choice just launched a new way to find people you should be following. Twitter’s new friend suggestion isn’t the mythical monetization strategy, but it will help you become more popular and have better breath.
Twitter has become an insanely popular medium for online over-sharing in real time. The service has broadcast people’s dietary habits, industry events and breaking news from the perspective of real people.
Finding other like-minded people on Twitter isn’t always so easy. Sometimes the search function will surface someone with similar interests based on a keyword search, but users only get 140 characters to talk about themselves.
This can often leave little clue about someone’s interests and industry affiliations. That’s if your keyword search finds people relevant to a topic at all.
Twitter put the friend suggestion tool under ‘Find People’ in the top menu bar along with an email friend finder. It’s hard to say how Twitter is suggesting friends, but the company’s method seems to have improved on existing methods.
Users have turned to third party applications to get friend recommendations. Tools such as Twubble find friends based on the common people that your friends are following.
The problem with Twubble is that its method only seems to find Twitter celebrities who are already well known industry figures. While that can be helpful for finding your way on Twitter, eventually users want to find people with similar interests.
Twitter’s friend suggestion tool recommended some interesting friends for me. However most of them are industry figures that I’m already fairly aware of. As a huge follower of mobile tools, the recommendation to follow a mobile Twitter application was probably the most relevant.
Hopefully Twitter engineers will continue fine-tuning the tool to recommend new and interesting friends. It seems like with tweets being so short, it should be easy to do some content analysis to see what users really care about.
So who is your favorite person to track on Twitter? Or is microblogging so 2008 that it’s not even funny? You can follow me at http://twitter.com/theregoesdave and our fearless leader at http://twitter.com/blorge.
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on Friday, January 16th, 2009 at 9:43 am
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January 17th, 2009
As Newsweek put it, “The dumbest innovation of the century. Memo to Tweeters: we don’t care what you think.”
January 17th, 2009
I’d agree with that.