“Similar to You” – the best tool on Twitter

New Twitter has created a lot of new features and tools to improve how people use the service. By far my favourite is the “Similar to You” tool that has just been added. This is a group of Twitter users who are chosen to appear at the side of every profile because they are “similar” to the users whose profile they appear on.

Simple and effective: four people who are chosen using an secret algorithm show in the right hand side of every profile.

Some bright spark even thought giving the option to click “Follow” right in the profile, so you don’t have to go to the person’s profile to begin following them.

The suggestions seem to be made around the topics the user is Tweeting. This means they’re a lot more accurate than the “Suggestions to Follow” which seem to exist only as a method of creating revenue for the site.

The browse method favours people with the most Followers. This means you can’t find random accounts you might be interested in unless they have thousands of Followers.

This tool is the first step in what I think will become Twitter’s Social Graph.
These features will be added to the API soon; and I think this will be a major step in helping increase the ranking of brands and helping people find their friends’ profiles more easily.

I would like to see some extensions to this feature. Instead of being able to Follow an account without any information about it apart from the user’s name, why not include the person’s description as a tool tip when you hover over their photo?

Also it would be useful if I could remove people from appearing in the suggestions. Yes they might be similar, but what if they are your ex? Or someone you have previously Followed and stopped because they over spam your homepage?

Overall as a first generation feature it is both simple and helpful. And I’m excited at the prospect of a Social Graph from Twitter and the tools that could be created with it…