Twiter’s “suggested users” list, which was introduced early this year will be eliminated soon, according to Evan Williams, CEO and co-founder of the micro-blogging platform. At the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, he said on Tuesday that he “desperately” wants to retire or evolve the company’s “suggested user” list, which offers suggestions of people to follow.
Since its launch, the feature has benefited high-profile Twitter accounts like Dell and Shaq who have been seeing astronomical jumps in the number of users subscribing to their profile updates. In some cases, popular people and companies have their followers counts edging past the 1 million mark.
Although the main objective of this feature was to create more active users who are in turn discovering and following more accounts, but it has been controversial for a while and has indeed created a distortion in terms of influence. Many users have complained that the “suggested users” list is pretty much not fair to millions of Twitterers that are NOT on that list.
What will replace it? Something more “Twittery and democratic,” Evan said. Probably something involving the new user-created “lists” feature that Twitter is rolling out. The user-created follow list is currently in beta, and is only available to a “small group” of users right now (though Twitter’s expanding it). The idea of this impressive feature is to allow people to curate lists of Twitter accounts. For example, you could create a list of the funniest Twitter accounts of all time, athletes, local businesses, friends, or any compilation that makes sense.
According to Twitter: “Lists are public by default (but can be made private) and the lists you’ve created are linked from your profile. Other Twitter users can then subscribe to your lists. This means lists have the potential to be an important new discovery mechanism for great tweets and accounts.”
