The Twitter White Lie Fuzzy Algorithm

Friday, August 6. 2010

The Twitter White Lie Fuzzy Algorithm

Today Twitter released its new "Who to Follow" List (I saw it on Techmeme). If you sign on to the Twitter Page for your account, on the right hand sidebar you will see it - 2 or so recommends amd you can click through to a whole list.

It seems to work on the logic that if several peopel I follow also follw X then logically I also should like X. It is the same problem I had with Last.FM's view of my taste in music - if 3 of my friends had the appalling bad taste to like Led Zeppelin, then so should I.

It is also, as Stowe Boyd points out, probably optimising around "most popular" which just makes it another Digital Social capital "Rich Gets Richer ratchet".

(By the way, my Twitter Inbox is deluged by people I follow who are p*ssed off with the Twitter "Who to Follow" function for the above reasons. So I don't think its a success, as yet anyway, except in the posts by the paid-for press and tame bloggers)

But that was not what intrigued me - no, what was more interesting was that of the 30 or so people it suggested I follow, I counted 21 people I was pretty darned sure I was following already! Now I didn't deliberately unfollow them, I don't think they can do a reverse unfollow of me (Can they? You b*stards?). Also, none of them are the sort of sleazoids (well, not on Twitter anyway) that Twitter picks up and automatically rubs out.

So how are they being unfollowed if I am not doing it?

Paul Clarke hypothesized that Twitter was doing it deliberately, a bit of Socal Fuzzines, a White Lie in the machine, so we can oil the wheels of online social intercourse with the "no - sorry - never saw that" or "odd, I was sure I was following you" gambits and the other person knows it might be true and takes no offence, rather than thinking that you are a b*stard who doesn't want to know them anymore.

And if so, how does it decide who to (randomly?) unfollow. I would love to have a "time-out" unfollow algorithm - 3 in a row of Sleb RT's, cats, lunch or using the word "Awesome" and you're in Purdah for a week

Or is it just glitches in the machine?

Posted by Alan Patrick in Social Networks at 12:17 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)

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Same experience on a much smaller scale: there were two people on there I thought I was following (and a whole bunch of "big name" journo twitters, who I couldn't really care less about)

#1 Adam Tinworth (Homepage) on 2010-08-06 14:23 (Reply)

Yup, its just the old "Suggested Follower" algorithm again. Don't know what all the rah rah is about (he said in jest, knowing its about a PR budget and paid-for press...)

#2 alan p on 2010-08-06 15:09 (Reply)

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