When Twitter launched a recommendation service this week called ‘ Who to Follow’, there were chirps of excitement across the micro- blogging site. Finally, Twitter account holders said, we would no longer have to rely on luck or our friends to follow someone. Here was a service that gave complete control over choice to the individual.
The jubilation, or relief, was shortlived. As it turned out, the people on the ‘ Who To Follow’ list are exactly the kind you don’t want to follow or at least, those you have decided not to follow. For instance, I keep getting recommended to follow President Barack Obama and actor Amitabh Bachchan. These two are undoubtedly pretty high on the popularity charts (hough Amitabh’s 300,000 followers pales into insignificance compared with Obama’s 4.8 million), I’d decided to not follow them. In any case, you don’t need a Twitter service to recommend these two. The decision to follow both is a no - brainer — if I wanted to, that is.
Instead, I would’ve loved to see Twitter recommend folks who are beyond the normal and yet influential. For instance, I want Twitter to recommend Ethan Zuckerman (@ ethanz). The Harvard University researcher heads Global Voices Online, a worldwide community of citizen media authors, and an advocacy group that works to preserve the freedom of speech online. He is right now creating opportunities for povertystricken Africans to leapfrog into the mainstream using technology.
I want Twitter also to recommend Katherine Tiedemann, a think tank expert based in Washington, D. C., who runs the AfPak Channel account for Foreign Policy magazine. Very rarely do you see such erudition on a subject that has consumed much of India’s foreign policy, and now, the world’s.
Yet, Twitter recommends only those people who are on your friends’ ‘Following’ list but who you have not followed.
Twitter, therefore, assumes that my followers and I think along the same lines. Well, we don’t. If we did, we’d be on Facebook. No?
0 comments:
Post a Comment