Twitter is rolling out a great new feature called “Who to Follow” that offers users personalized recommendations for people to follow on the microblogging service. If you’re one of the Twitter users selected early for the roll out (like me!), you’ll find the new feature on the top right of your homepage at Twitter.com (when you’re logged into an account).
Twitter introduced the new “Who to Follow” feature in a blog post yesterday:
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.
The new feature is a little bit like Facebook’s “Friend Suggestions,” which uses your information to recommend people you are likely to know personally who you can “friend” on the social network. Twitter’s “Who to Follow” feature, however, finds strangers with similar interests whose tweets you might never have found otherwise. After all, Twitter has more than 100 million users, so it’s impossible to just run across all relevant people.
I’ve already used the feature to find dozens of Twitter accounts I’m interested in following. Just about all the recommendations have been solid (I suspect, though, this feature might not work so well for people who are not already following people who discuss topics they find interesting). The only downside I see is finding enough time to check out all the matches made in Twitter … and still have some time left to tweet!
Have you found any interesting new people to follow using the new feature? Please share your experiences below.
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