San Francisco — Twitter, the ever-growing social micro-blogging service that has recently published its 20 billionth Tweet, recently unveiled a novel feature to keep users engaged on its site: a new tool called “Who To Follow,” which basically suggests other members users might want to follow “based on several factors, including people you follow and the people they follow.”
Generally speaking, it is very complicated to find interesting and like minded folks from millions of Twitter users who have minimal or no profile information.
Now, this recently released feature that is similar to Facebook’s “People You May Know” concept, will help you find people you should follow, as it offers a selection of users that have similar interests with you, besides, day-by-day it is becoming more and more challenging to find interesting people between the hundreds of thousands of new Twitter users registering every day, many of them being spammers that tweet once or twice and then disappear.
“With more than a hundred million users on Twitter, there are sure to be at least dozens of accounts out there that will reflect your interests. The trouble is finding all of them,” the company says.
On the official Twitter blog, Twitter communications executive Carolyn Penner stated that: “Today we are beginning to roll out a simple, but powerful new feature to help address that — ‘Suggestions for You,‘ the algorithms in this application, created by our user suitability team, suggest people you do not currently follow that you may find interesting. Now these algorithms are said to examine several factors that also include people they follow and people you follow.”
For instance, if you are enthusiastic about food and you are following loads of users who like food and tweet about food then similar folks will show up in the Suggestions list.
Thus, on the “Find People,” page on Twitter site, members can currently select general topics they are interested in — like Art & Design or Technology — in order to see suggestions of people to follow who tweet about those areas. Also, if you wish to hide any particular user from showing up in the suggestions list, click on the Hide option below the Follow button. Choose for yourself who is worth following in order to avoid unnecessary noise in your timeline.
Furthermore, location will play another major role in these recommendations, it seems. The new “Suggestions for you” feature — not yet enforced in all accounts — helps users find interesting people on Twitter and those who have not been able to see it as yet then you will get it soon. Also, if you visit any other Twitter user’s profile, you will still see suggestions of other similar users worth following there.
Moreover, the suggestion feature will be available for developers, too, so they can implement it in their desktop or online Twitter clients via Twitter’s API.
This latest launch comes as Twitter has embarked on to make itself more accessible and interesting to members, including launching a guide on how to use the site, along with a new homepage that features an always-refreshing list of “Top Tweets,” scrolling trending topics as well as mugs of popular Tweeters.