Twitter's 'Suggestions For You' Recommends People You Should Follow

Just in time for Follow Friday, Twitter has just introduced a new feature, "Suggestions for You," that offers users personalized recommendations for people to follow on Twitter.

Twitter introduced "Suggestions for You" in a blog post:

The algorithms in this feature, built by our user relevance team, suggest people you don't currently follow that you may find interesting. The suggestions are based on several factors, including people you follow and the people they follow. You'll see these suggestions on Twitter.com and the Find People section.

(See screenshots below)

When you view an account, you'll also be shown suggestions for other, similar accounts you could follow on Twitter.

The new feature resembles Facebook's "Friend Suggestions," which uses your information to recommend people you can "friend" on the social network.

Have you tried it out? What do you think of the new tool?

Comments

[Terence Towles Canote]

06:28 PM on 07/31/2010

Honestly, I find the suggestion­s on Twitter (which they have chosen to call the grammatica­lly incorrect "Who to Know") annoying. It is simply a box on my sidebar which I will never use, and one that forces me to scroll down in order to see my lists and the trending topics. I wish they would remove it or at least let us hide it!

[MarkVaughan]

08:39 PM on 07/30/2010

I am hoping that this feature gets better with time because the list of people they recommende­d for me were the EXACT OPPOSITE of the people I would like to hear from. I got Jillian Michaels, Kirstie Alley, Dr. Wayne Dyer, Brittany Spears, a guy named Ray J, Paris Hilton and Ryan Seacrest.
Who came up with this list?!!? If they wanted to present a list of popular celebritie­s, they succeeded, but how does this help me. How does it help anyone. Connect me to people I may not know who are interested in the things I am, but don't waste my time suggesting people that I would have no trouble finding if I wanted to.
It is sad to see twitter helping to recruit people to hear the thoughts of such vacuous people. Thanks twitter, maybe you will recommend Lindsay Lohan's jail twitter feed next.

[RickBakas]

01:21 PM on 07/31/2010

Exactly.

They might think about changing the name to "Suggested list of celebritie­s who won't follow you back or respond to any of your tweets". Incredibly disappoint­ing Twitter's suggested users are mostly celebritie­s.

[MrVee]

03:50 PM on 08/01/2010

True that.
But you do realize HP caters to celebs and much of pop culture.
But I agree with you RickBakas. The people they point to for us to follow are people who we will never meet and if we did know them, it's possible we might not even care for em.

I tend to follow many of the bloggers that post on Huffington­. They seem to be more real than those who spend their lives "faking it" on the big screen.

[Mace Moneta]

06:09 PM on 07/30/2010

All I ever get when I try it is:

Something is technicall­y wrong.
Thanks for noticing—w­e're going to fix it up and have things back to normal soon.

Nice work there, twitter. Can't wait for Diaspora to go public.