Finally, Twitter suggestions make sense

  Following up on two recent posts.
  Observations on Twitter's newest iteration on suggesting people to follow.
  1. They're not just suggesting people with mega-inflated follower lists by the SUL mess. Some of the people they're suggesting have small lists, so what they're saying is inherently more interesting to me. People with a million followers tend to run ads, whether they're directly paid for them or not.
  2. The seeds they are using appear not to be random. In other words, somehow they've figured out who I'm related to professionally and intellectually. I have tended to follow a fair number of people who are random, just based on them saying something interesting. Those people don't seem to be playing a role in who they choose to recommend.
  3. Many of the people they suggest are people I am actually interested in following, though I'm not yet doing it, I already have an overloaded Twitter stream. As some have noted they recommend people I know who I have deliberately chosen not to follow. But they are easily removed from the list and once-removed it stops suggesting them.
  4. Anticipating that more people are seeing my profile now in a semi-serious mode, I've made mine more factual and less snarky.
  Some suggestions for the suggestions:
  1. I'd love to see know who Twitter is recommending me to. And are they subscribing?
  2. Even better I'd like to have a way to walk the network of recommendations to see who they're recommending to the people I follow, and the people they follow and on and on. Is there an API for this? (Admittedly I haven't looked at the Twitter API in quite a while. Not interested in firehoses, and the rest of the movement seems to be pointless make-work for developers. Something like a server software dead-man switch. Ugh.)
  Hey it's been a while since Twitter did something interesting. This qualifies.