I moaned about Twitter’s new suggestions for you/who to follow feature last week, but despite this I was kind of hoping I was being my (occasional) curmudgeon self and their touted ‘algorithm’ was going to right itself and eventually suggest people I might actually want to follow. You know: interesting people.

No such luck. All week long it’s been nothing but individuals who are either members of the suggested user suggestions list, random verified users and people or brands who have the slightest connection to me because I said something loosely connected about them once. While drinking.

I mean, it’s been accounts like Oprah Winfrey, for Christ’s sake. Not to mention Stephen Fry and Alan Davies, one of whom I have zero interest in following, and the other who I couldn’t even if I wanted to.

And just now Twitter suggested Kanye West.

Kanye West.

Two thoughts:

1. This is garbage, and
2. So is their ‘algorithm’

Thank God for the hide button, but I fear that if I click this any more I’ll end up with Carpal Tunnel. Can’t I just hide the entire lousy feature?

Come on Twitter, you can do better than this. Can’t you?

To Twitter’s credit, they keep trying stuff like this. Unfortunately, despite their best intentions, it never really works out how they intended.

Head over to the Find People section on Twitter.com, and click on Suggestions For You. Here’s the word from the official blog.

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. Today we’re beginning to roll out a simple, but powerful new feature to help address that — “Suggestions for You”. 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. If you like a suggestion, click “follow”; if you don’t, click “hide,” and we’ll try not to suggest that user again.

I tried this, of course, and was presented with the usual suspects – about half a dozen people I’d long since unfollowed, one who had blocked me, several more I have absolutely zero interest in and – ahem – Fearne Cotton. To be fair, they did identify a work colleague I wasn’t following, so well done there.

Perhaps you’ll fair better than I did. However, I’m going to hazard a guess that – much like the ‘people you might know’ suggestions on Facebook (I very, very, very rarely do) – no matter how smart your people are, their friend-finding algorithms are never quite smart enough.

Relationships can’t, and let’s be honest here, never should be identifiable by moving some numbers around a piece of paper. It just doesn’t work like that. And I suspect that’s something we should be really grateful about.

PS. You’ll also find a ‘who to follow’ addition in the top right-hand corner of your Twitter.com homepage. Click ‘view all’ to go straight to your Suggestions For You tab.

Twitter’s had a torrid few months and continues to have problems with error rates and API calls, but that’s simply scratching the absolute tip of the bugs and issues iceberg.

Here are five big holes that Twitter needs to fill.

Staff

Twitter is clearly understaffed. The company is actively hiring – there are 39 vacancies at the time of writing – and that’s a good sign, but they really need to step it up.

The company has documented their void in engineering, but of equal concern is the size of their support team. @Delbius et al do the best they can, but more often than not support enquiries still get little more than an auto-responded list of frequently asked questions and a rapidly-closed ticket.

I’m not sure exactly how many of their 241 current employees work in support, but I do know that only three of the 39 vacancies are in this area. In both cases, it isn’t enough – only 11% of my readers rate Twitter’s support as good to excellent. A whopping 79% rate it as below average to terrible.

Better Privacy Solutions

As I’ve documented on various occasions on this blog, Twitter’s block is not actually a block at all. The only way to get true security on your updates is to make them private. There needs to be a middle ground.

Read the rest of this entry

Some interesting updates from Twitter yesterday in direct response to some downtime we saw on Monday and, let’s face it, a good couple of months of very poor network performance on Twitter.com and their API.

On the main blog, Twitter “PR guy” Matt Graves (@mgrooves) writes about reliability. Specifically, how Twitter seems to be seriously lacking it of late, but they’re trying really hard to improve.

When you can’t update your profile photo, send a Tweet, or even sign on to Twitter, it’s frustrating. We know that, and we’ve had too many of these issues recently.

As we said last month, we are working on long-term solutions to make Twitter a more reliable and stable platform. It’s our number one priority. The bulk of our engineering efforts are currently focused on this issue, and we have moved resources from other projects to focus on it.

In two posts over on the Twitter engineering blog, Twitter engineer Jean-Paul Cozzatti (@jeanpaul) writes about Twitter’s plans to move their technical infrastructure to a new, custom-built data center in the Salt Lake City area.

Twitter’s user base has continued to grow steadily in 2010, with over 300,000 people a day signing up for new accounts on an average day. Keeping pace with these users and their Twitter activity presents some unique and complex engineering challenges (as John Adams, our lead engineer for application services, noted in a speech last month at the O’Reilly Velocity conference). Having dedicated data centers will give us more capacity to accommodate this growth in users and activity on Twitter.

Cozzatti also compares Twitter’s growth to ‘riding a rocket’, adding:

As we said last month, keeping pace with record growth in Twitter’s user base and activity presents some unique and complex engineering challenges. We frequently compare the tasks of scaling, maintaining, and tweaking Twitter to building a rocket in mid-flight.

During the World Cup, Twitter set records for usage. While the event was happening, our operations and infrastructure engineers worked to improve the performance and stability of the service. We have made more than 50 optimizations and improvements to the platform, including:

• Doubling the capacity of our internal network;
• Improving the monitoring of our internal network;
• Rebalancing the traffic on our internal network to redistribute the load;
• Doubling the throughput to the database that stores tweets;
• Making a number of improvements to the way we use memcache, improving the speed of Twitter while reducing internal network traffic; and,
• Improving page caching of the front and profile pages, reducing page load time by 80 percent for some of our most popular pages.

Cozzatti also updates us on Twitter’s current user count – 125 million. That’s up over 20 million since April of this year, which is a pretty amazing jump.

And it’s one that is clearly bringing a ton of issues. I’m hopeful that this move to a richer infrastructure this Autumn will almost certainly improve performance – you know, once we’re past the 1-2 months of new problems that this transition will inevitably bring – but as Cozzatti himself notes, Twitter is a “relatively small crew maintaining a comparatively large (rocket) ship.”

Making these improvements to Twitter’s technology is an essential step, but to properly scale the organisation clearly needs more of everything – money, of course, but especially people. And they need them now. And it’s not just engineering – it’s everywhere across the company.

All the equipment in the world won’t make a lick of difference if there aren’t enough people around to fix it all the next time something goes wrong. In fact, it’ll just compound the problem. And if you think performance is mediocre now we’ve moved above 100 million users, then just imagine what it will be like when we hit a billion.

Time for another rant. My usual disclaimer applies.

Your Twitter Background Is Free And Off The Shelf

Here’s the thing – customised Twitter backgrounds are largely a waste of time. Until Twitter decides to make them interactive and allows us to add links and apps and other customisable options – which could perhaps let them compete with Facebook pages – unless you’re very important there’s really not a lot of point in spending a lot of time and effort on your background.

By and large, and because there’s not much to do once they get there, people only tend to visit your profile page directly (and thus see your background) a couple of times – once, when they’re deciding whether to follow you when you’re an unknown quantity, and possibly a second time when they’re trying to remember who the heck you are a few months later.

If you simply must have a background, you’re better off customising it yourself (perhaps utilising the services of your favourite designer pal), using a simple (and original) tile, or even one of Twitter’s options, than you are using a freebie service that proudly displays TWITTERBACKGROUND.ORG on the top-left of the page. Not only does that look lame, it is lame.

And even if your background is absolutely first class, remember that different monitor sizes and screen resolutions mean that all those email address, URLs and telephone numbers you carefully placed on the left sidebar can be completely invisible to those millions of people using netbooks and mobile handsets.

Unless you’re very skilled and/or can put together something absolutely incredible – that works on any screen size – it really isn’t worth going to too much trouble. Read the rest of this entry