Twitter Recommends Who You Should Follow

Twitter recently unveiled a new feature for the web based version of their social media messaging service aptly named Who to Follow.  You may recall that they used to have a feature named Suggested Followers which was a system that recommend followers when you first signed up for the service and that could be accessed once you joined.  The controversy with that feature was how did someone get on that list to be suggested.

Well rumors were rampant about how people actually got on there and it caused an uproar because an appearance on that list usually resulted in a significant increase in followers.

That feature has since been retired and now they are introducing this new version of it called Who To Follow.  No longer is it a mystery how you get on this list – it is all about what your bio says and who you currently follow.  An algorithm developed by the Twitter engineers using those factors is what creates that list of recommend people to follow.

You will first see this feature show up in the right hand side of the Twitter web interface right underneath your username and stats:

You can either click on follow to immediately follow them, click the X to remove them from the list or click the view all link to get the entire page of recommendations:

If you look at the detail on the recommendations you will see who amongst your followers also follows this recommended account:

All of the recommended accounts are ones you are not currently following and as you can see the ones on my recommended page are tied to space and technology type stuff which is prominent in my bio.

I think Twitter has hit this one out of the park.  So far none of the recommendations have been bad for me.  Yes, there were a few I did not follow but all in all it has been on the mark.

What do you think of the new who to follow feature?

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Richard Hay  (3358 Posts)

Richard is the Owner of WindowsObserver.com and has been involved in tech for over 25 years. His first website – AnotherWin95.com – came online in 1995. Back then he used GeoCities Web Hosting for it and what you see here today is the result of the work he has continued on the site since 1995. In January 2010 his community contributions were recognized by Microsoft when he was awarded the Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Award for Windows Desktop Experience. In January 2011 he was renewed as a Microsoft MVP but in a new category called Windows Expert - Consumer and in January 2012 he received the award for the third time.