I Forgot My Mantra is Scott Jackson's webtumblespacelog.

On Who To Follow

So, Twitter’s got a new recommendations feature called Who To Follow. The feeling I’m getting from around the place is that it’s not such a great feature. I don’t think recommendations are a bad idea, but I think that Twitter’s going about it the wrong way. Here are two reasons why Who To Follow is Doing It Wrong™.

1. All it’s doing is trying to get you to fill in the graph. Even then, it’s not being all that smart about how it does that. Who To Follow puts together a big graph of who follows who and tells you where the holes are so you can fill them in. Some of us put a lot of thought into who we follow, and some of us intentionally leave those holes there. I’ve already had Twitter recommend some people to me whose tweets I know I don’t enjoy. I know others have experienced same. It just doesn’t seem like a very subtle or nuanced system — basing recommendations on who follows who gives you a very shallow algorithm. Think about it — Who To Follow bases recommendations on a series of one-bit (“following” or “not-following”) relationships between people, and that’s it. No consideration for anything deeper.

2. It’s pushing new people on you. Constantly. Whenever you hit the homepage, it’s there. People aren’t always looking for new friends¹. The most common thing I’ve heard so far is that recommendations are a good idea, but that there should be some way to hide it.

If only there was some kind of website thing that did Twitter recommendations that were tailored to each individual user and that also wasn’t always pushing new potential friends on you.

Oh well.

¹: I can only assume that Twitter thought of this at some point, which makes me wonder why they put Who To Follow on the homepage — maybe they noticed a slowdown in users following new people over time and decided to give users a very easy, visible way to follow new people. They’re the only ones that have access to that kind of data at a macro level, so I couldn’t say for sure. Maybe they’re just putting it on the homepage for now, for the launch of the feature.