PYMK
Twitter has just introduced a ‘people you may know’ feature, lifted straight out of Facebook, it seems, right down to the position on the Twitter website is appears in.
Why? I’m not sure it really enhances the user experience much. With Facebook, you make friendship connections with people you’re meant to already know from real life. So if you and some third party have a lot of mutual friends then there is a chance that you will know that person as well, through one or more of said mutual connections.
But Twitter isn’t like that. You don’t follow people you know just because you know them. You follow them because you might be interested in their updates. I wouldn’t automatically follow someone just because I know them and I wouldn’t expect any of my friends to put up with any of the tweetstream spamming I do unless they actually get something out of it.
So all the ‘people you should follow’ feature can offer is suggesting Twitter accounts that the people you follow are following. That’s not really helpful. If everyone followed every suggestion we’d all end up following each other and that would make Twitter pointless.
A better option would to be some kind of semantic analysis or hashtag logging that suggested people who hashtag the same kinds of topics as you. But that is almost redundant because hashtags are clickable to find out who else is talking about that stuff. It would require some long-term data collection to build up a profile of hashtags that could then be compared like a last.fm profile to match your tweet-compatibility.
I think this could be another feature that the Twitter team is trying to monetise. We’ve all seen the ‘promoted’ button next to certain trending topics… how long before Coca-Cola appears in your ‘people you should follow’ box with a little ‘promoted’ sticker next to its name?
I thought I’d at least have already quit Facebook by the time Twitter got ruined.