Twitter Changes “Suggest User List”

Recently Twitter has axed it’s controversial “Suggested Users List” after many had pointed out that it was hugely unfair and with the new advent of “Lists” it was pretty obsolete.

They still have a suggestion list for new registrations, but it’s done a little differently now.  Most notably there is no way to “Follow them All” with one click which is what a huge majority of new registrations were doing.  Now you actually have to scroll through and read at least the bios on each recommended user and decide if they are of interest to you, I know revolutionary right?

While I really do not like the SUL and think it was in fact very unfair as a whole, I do think that some sort of starter list needs to be available for new people so that they don’t just wallow around and get bored not understanding what exactly to do.  I think this can be handled in different ways and should be.  Granting certain people thousands of followers a day just to cover up inadequacies in your documentation and site documentation is not a good way to go about it.  If letting a new user basically auto-follow 25-50 suggested users is the best mechanism you have come up with then you need to dig deeper.  I think it’s getting to the point that Twitter is so exposed that most people should know what Twitter does and how to go about it.  I say scrap the SUL all together and use a system that’s similar to Facebook by suggesting people based off your contacts.  They already do this you say.  Yes they do, but a step two is needed here.  Once those initial contacts are imported then use those “friends” to suggest other “friends” just like Facebook does.  This allows peoples networks to grow without tipping the playing field in favor of a select few.

Many people are now crying that certain people have gained an unfair advantage and that those not on the list will never be able to realistically catch those with over a million followers.  This may be true.  In fact I believe it is.  And if twitter were to fail I think this will be a fundamental reason.  In something that was supposed to operate on the internet, the great equalizer and democratizing tools of our day, Twitter has found a way to hand a lot of the power to a select few.  Who cares you say?  Most people going about their day to day business wont really care, if they are even aware, but the simple fact remains that followers are a commodity.  Someone with over a million followers posts a message about a new post on their blog, how many hits do you think that link will get?  As compared to a new account that runs a similar blog and posts a message to their 5,000 followers gained via hard work and good participation.  Huge huge advantage to the fortunate account.

There is even an uproar about zeroing out follower lists or a clean wipe and starting over.  No, no, no, NO!  This is crazy.  Most people would up and walk away and the momentum gained would be entirely lost.  I know I for one would lose a LOT of work.  Punishing the hard working people who have embraced twitter into their daily lives is not the answer to level the playing field.  Instead I say we need to take one step and then give it time.  That step is an inactive account purge.  I strongly believe that many many many of the “followers” that some of these huge accounts have are people who signed up out of curiosity to check out what everyone was talking about, clicked follow all saying “what the hell – let me see what this is about” and never logged in again.  Maybe they stuck it out for two weeks and just didn’t get it and returned to Facebook.  If there was an account purge of say accounts not accessed in the last 6 months I have a feeling you would see a large drop off in their numbers.  In fact many are reporting that since the SUL was changed a lot of these big accounts are losing members on a daily basis.  Aside from the curious users who play for a week and never come back you have the people that get into it and start to figure things out and after a few weeks they start to realize they really couldn’t care less about what Ashton Kutcher is blabbing about, or where in the world P Diddy is.  What he really wants is some NY Jets beat writers and some Mets  bloggers so he can get up to the minute news on his teams.  See?  This is the real power of Twitter.  So he starts to prune off those early mistakes he made with his loose twitter morales.

With an account purge and allowing a year for things to level off I think you will start to see those who actually bring the goods will continue to gain followers and those that are pretty much just celebrity vanity accounts will lose real followers.  Eventually my hope is that things might even level out.