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New Suggested Friends Tool On Twitter Incredibly Useful
Like it? Tell your friends!
Twitter has started rolling our new suggested user lists based on who you follow and who follows you. It’s something that has been missing for some time now on Twitter and personalization of the service like this is really going to help the Twitter expand further. This is in some ways a smarter version of the suggested user list which mostly featured 500 random celebrities and Twitter power users. One of the biggest issues that I have had with Twitter is that the amount of people I have added recently has dried up because I just have not had the time to use Google or Twitter search to find all the people I am looking for. This latest move by Twitter really is a move in to Facebook’s realm because one of the biggest success stories of that site has been the power for Facebook to suggest people that you should be friends with and aide you with simple discovery of people you should be in contact with.
How Smart Is The Suggested User List?
The feature is still being rolled out as we speak and it should be appearing on all profiles soon but it does have a couple of issues in that most of the people on the suggested lists that I have seen are people that I am very aware of on Twitter and have chosen not to follow as well as most of the suggestions being very localized in terms of their geographic spread. What I do like about this though is that for the first time in ages there are tons of people that I could start following to improve my stream and the UI makes it incredibly simple to click the follow button and start adding people. I’m pretty sure that the lists will start to get smarter as more and more people use them.
Discovery As A Whole Much Easier Now
Clicking on the find people now opens up a whole range of options to discover new people and that can only be a good thing for twitter and is probably why they have spent so much time developing this new set of features. I can now find people via email, via country or interests or just by simple search. Twitter really really needed to do this because I personally found that my own stream was getting tired and staid but I just didn’t have the time or desire to add new users but with these new features it changes everything.
Becoming More Like Facebook
Twitter is many things to many people including a breaking news tool and live search engine but ultimately it needs to be a social service and for a while that has been lacking because I just haven’t had an easy way of finding new users and people I know. Facebook have been the kings of connecting you with friends from the past, work and college friends and that has paid off so spectacularly. I love Twitter and find it incredibly useful at times but I have always found it fell down on connecting me with my real offline friends (mostly because they are not there yet). Hopefully this new suggested user list will spring Twitter on to the next level and make an incredibly useful tool even more powerful and engaging.
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Interesting to see how people use this, especially as many people don’t log in to twitter to tweet but use various software like hootsesuite. No doubt the likes of Hootsuite will work it into what tey offer too, adding the value to their users.
Just checked it out! It’s excellent!
Yeah Mark they are allowing 3rd party apps to use the same stuff so people like Hootsuite and tweetdeck will be able to do lots of cool stuff with it!
Cheers Niall thought as much, even though they have hit the sound barrier with the amount of tweets most people are connecting all their profiles. Searching is changing as we are becoming less likely to use search engines and more likely to start using searches fed through third party software.
[...] No real surprises here as Re tweets are generally seen as a vote of confidence in a user and the content they are tweeting so natural step I suppose for people to follow them. As I have said in the past finding people on Twitter can be hard but Re tweets and new features do make that easier. [...]