Have you read Dave Winer’s post about Twitter and their “Suggested Users” list?
I think his title is a bit melodramatic, but he’s essentially correct about the relationship that Twitter needs to maintain with its users: hands-off.
Unlike Winer, I can *completely* understand where they’re coming from with a feature like that. Twitter, after all, is kind of a weird concept to people who don’t yet get it, and following some interesting users is a great way to get into it.
I guess the problem is the hand-picked nature of the list. What I might try, if I were working on the next feature, would be this: ask new users if they want to go through the “suggested user guide.”
If they do, provide a series of questions (check boxes, maybe?) about their interests, and then generate a custom list of potential users based on both their filled in profile information and some basic word-use analysis on their tweets.
It won’t be perfect, but it would be fair. I doubt even Dave Winer would complain about that.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Jason as you said, Twitter can be a weird concept for newcomers to get so a lot of the recent adds to Twitter (integrated search, trends, and suggested users) have been efforts to appeal to the mainstream. Recruitment of celebrities and other well-known “identities” is also tied to increasing the number of those mainstream users and keeping them active. I see the Suggested Users list in a similar manner. Twitter is recommending entertaining users that they feel will be very attractive to mainstream users. Whether we find them interesting or not, Britney Spears, Hammer, Dave Matthews and Sockamillion the cat are a lot more compelling than tech-heads Winer, Scoble and Calacanis.
I totally agree that Twitter should be “hands off.” What if, rather than making you fill out some sort of interests checklist – which I assume would require going through and categorizing existing users – they instead simply showed a randomized assortment of “active” users? (”active” meaning minimum of X number of followers or updates). Or maybe an assortment of those who updated in the last 30 seconds?
I also don’t like the term “suggested.” It’s a very loaded word.
Warren – I hadn’t actually been thinking of it in terms of which users would be more popular to the mainstream crowd, but you’re right – the ones on that list are far more likely to matter to the less techie universe.
However, I still think it’s important to recognize that there *is* monetary value in being on that list (assuming the list is constant), and it should be treated as such.
Courtenay – That would be easier, yes, but I think it would be far less useful to the user. How about both? Provide a random list of active users for starters, and give users the option to drill down by their interests if they choose to spend the time doing so.