Oh, How I Wish I Could Be A Suggested User, Too

Earlier today in the Twittersphere things were slightly aflutter over the massive rise in the follow count of @adventuregirl, aka Stefanie Michaels. Check out her Twittercounter over the past week:

From 193 followers on February 26, to 37,945 as of the time of writing. In a week. And she’s been a member of Twitter since August 6, 2008. (To fully appreciate the madness, check out the 3-month chart.)

That’s pretty impressive, right?

Or is it? @craigteich, for one, seemed pretty pissed.

Initially, the feeling – and I dare say, the blame – was that @adventuregirl must have benefitted from being placed on Twitter.com’s very controversial ‘Suggested Users’ list, which anybody can access via the ‘Find People’ tab on the home page.

(You can read most of the Tweets about this issue here.)

The feature, which was launched in January of this year, has allowed several Twitter users, new and old – including TechCrunch, MC Hammer, the New York Times, CNN and Whole Foods – to see an enormous jump in their follow count.

Twitter themselves have said the main reason for the suggested followers tab is because many new users to the service don’t really understand that following people is essentially the basic point.

“The reason we created this feature is because lots of people sign up to Twitter but aren’t following anyone, so we’re trying to help get them started,” says Evan Williams, one of Twitter’s co-founders (and chief executive).

Which is fine, in principle. The stink being created by the list is the kinds of people that Twitter is choosing to suggest. Namely, folk on Twitter who are already doing pretty well for themselves. The movers and the shakers. Those who already have enough of a follow count to be a pretty big deal when it comes to influence on the network. This stuff does matter, and that’s why it’s been seen as a poor decision on the part of Twitter’s management.

But it gets a little more controversial than this. All manner of accusations have been flying around: people are buying their way on to the list; lots of the new followers for these Twitter names have suspiciously default profile pictures, or little to no Tweets; what’s the deal with Al Gore and John McCain being recommended? And so on and so forth.

The suggested users list seems to change modestly from time to time, but there is no specific criteria used when it comes to those featured; everybody gets the same list on any given day. Right now, I’m starting at the profile shots of the likes of Dell, 10 Downing Street, Coldplay, Women’s Wear Daily and Chuck Palahniuk. I mean, to be fair, that’s a pretty broad spectrum, but that isn’t the point.

Twitter have said that in the future they plan to make these recommendations cater more to the user’s interests, but that it’s “not super-high on the priority list”. Which is a shame, as that would end the fuss here and now.

One of the problems with Twitter is despite the ever-increasing and already quite vast number of users is that it’s actually a fairly insular place. Some of the big names on the network follow very few people – often only each other – but have tens or hundreds of thousands of followers themselves, and that’s a situation that’s been worsened by the current celebrity influx. I already pointed out how most of the major celebrities on Twitter follow hardly anybody at all (and in many cases, no-one). This, to me, and I believe all reasonable people, is the opposite of how it was supposed to work.

I’ve made the statement before that Twitter is about socialisation. If you’re just using the platform as a soapbox, then I think you’re going about things backwards. If you’re famous already, then good for you. Twitter isn’t – or at least, in my opinion wasn’t meant to be – somewhere for you to come to speak to the fans. It’s a two-way medium; a massive collaboration of the exchange of information. Which means you have to listen, too. (Whether Twitter will ever adopt my ideas for forced ratios between followers and followees is anyone’s guess. But I believe they should.)

I think where this has perhaps angered many of the Twitter users who have built-up their large follow counts from scratch – i.e., they weren’t famous when they signed-up and didn’t have an already popular blog or website that they could easily use to port across a following – is that they felt they had to work to get where they are on Twitter. Now, whether it is or ever should be work at all is somewhat debatable, but if we accept that it is then this is perhaps fair comment. Who are Twitter to decide who and who does not make their list of recommendations? Shouldn’t something like this come from the Twittersphere itself, and not the founders? Are the founders even in touch with Twitter at all? Were they ever, or it possibly a bit like the accusations levelled at Lost, and they’re just making it up as they go along?

The solution to this gaff – and that’s exactly what it is – as I hinted at above, is fairly simple. Make the list both relative to the user and definable by the Twittersphere. Hence, if I sign up to Twitter (or just go look at the suggested users tab right now) it should produce a list that is governed by both my likes and dislikes (via my bio and/or Tweets) and also crosschecked against my existing followers and then ranked in either popularity or relevance (with the option to view it both ways).

I would suggest doing this or not at all, as otherwise while you might to some extent appease newcomers to the service – inasmuch as they’ll get that the point is to follow other people, especially those you don’t already know – you’re just going to annoy those who have been here from way back when. No online service should cater only for its long term users; but you do need to throw ‘em a bone once in a while.

As for @adventuregirl, turns out it was all a fuss over nothing. Stefanie Michaels is a real-life famous person, and just carried over an already-existing and huge fan base, many of whom also signed up to Twitter for the first time.

And I say to this, fair play. That’s one advantage that the celebrity Twitterers will always have. But that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be a level playing field for everybody else.

EDIT: After further investigation and discussion with @craigteich, it turns out that @adventuregirl was promoted on Twitter’s ‘suggested user’ list after all.

The evidence for this can be seen here.

It’s true that Stefanie Michaels links to her @adventuregirl account on her official web site, but she also links to her personal account, too. Because the latter has very few followers (certainly relatively), it’s pretty obvious that being on the ‘suggested users’ list played a significant part in @adventuregirl’s enormous, and rapid, following. Yes, she might be fairly well-known in ‘real life’, but that clearly doesn’t equate to an automatic following on Twitter.

Which, all-in-all, is a bit of a shame. Still, it definitely emphasises the points made in my article above.

Thanks to @craigteich for putting me on the straight and narrow.

FINAL THOUGHTS: After writing this, it occurred to me that Twitter’s attempts to match us up with other users are always going to be sloppy due to the limitations of a 160-character bio and because many people fill these bios with fluff. To get around this, I propose a deeper, non-public bio is offered to the user, which asks a myriad of questions about your interests, and the site uses that to match you up in the ‘suggested user’ list. Thoughts?

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