Twitter’s suggested user list or Twitter’s revenue stream source finally?
The concept can be a good idea for new users to Twitter but then again maybe not. I asked the question when I signed up “Outside of my friends, who should I follow”. I received a huge number of responses from the people I knew out in the real world and all of the suggested people to follow were top notch, plus I picked up a few others that have been suggested by someone I had starting following through a previous suggestion.
I doubt there is any formula that can replicate such a high quality of suggested users to follow on Twitter. The suggested followers list that Twitter now has is a mystery box, no one outside of Twitter knows how its produced and the likes of Robert Scoble has inferred there might be some sort of payola going on to get you on the list. If Scoble’s theory is correct and individuals or most likely companies individuals are working for are paying to have their high profile employees show up on this list giving them instant access to thousands of new eyeballs, then the usefulness of Twitter is now dead.
If someone can pay Twitter to have their name shoved in front of every new user signing up and to be just a click away from having unrestricted access to filling potentially tens of thousands of users time-lines with whatever marketing propaganda we’ll start to see users flee from Twitter in droves. Now Everyone has done this from time to time, they see someone they respect post a URL on twitter and then follow it, that’s a powerful bit of marketing. Now imagine that company X pays Twitter to have their favorite online celebrity be on the suggested user list and then that celebrity tweets about the product from company X and links the website. Boom! Unquie page views out the wazoo, that has to be worth a lot to a company. Also, seeing that Twitter doesn’t have a solid revenue stream right now, it could be very tempting to them.
Truthfully I don’t see a huge problem with Twitter using their suggested user list as a source of income, where I find issue is Twitter not disclosing that fact. It may only be sitting wrong with me because I have perhaps a misguided view about holding tech journalists to the same standards of integerity that I hold news journalists to and I don’t like the thought of that intergrity being put into question.
