Illustration of what the Twitter Suggestions list has meant to those picked, and those not. - Leo Laporte from Bookmarklet

Leo: a better one to watch is http://twittercounter.com/compare... @noah was one of the guys who came up with Twitter and @biz works at Twitter. - Robert Scoble

its a conspiracy! - Lasse Johnsen

It shows how subjective this reward is and how it made follower counts totally unreliable. But there's s omething deeper underneath these stats. Many of these accounts are not from real people. Twitter, er, @ev, is totally underplaying how many fake accounts are getting created lately. - Robert Scoble

Leo: a discussion of "real" users vs. "fake" ones is here: http://friendfeed.com/e... - Robert Scoble

Doesn't an influx of fake accounts mean a buyout is imminent? - Steven Cains

More doesn't always mean better! - Fee501st

It isn't hard to follow (no pun intended) the cause and effect here. Many (most) users got obsessed with driving high follower numbers. We started talking about # of followers as "authority" (ack). Suddenly (shockingly?) we found that people started gaming the system (auto-follow/un-follow systems) in utterly transparent attempts to drive up their follower count. And here we are... - Brian Roy

Leo: don't you think you may someday be one of those "suggested users?" Would that be a good thing or bad thing? - Andy Sternberg

It's a dumb move by Twitter. It certainly disincents me to promote my Twitter account to the million+ listeners on my national radio show and podcasts. Why bother? Friendfeed makes more sense now. And @Andy, no, Twitter will never promote me back. I'm too often critical of them. (And I'd prefer they didn't - at least the people who do follow me are mostly real people!) - Leo Laporte

"I'm too often critical of them" -- no doubt. That's why being recommended by them isn't actually an endorsement, it's the opposite -- it implies that you're in their pocket. That's why this thing poisons integrity on Twitter. - Dave Winer

But friendfeed has "recommended users" too -- which appears to be weighted toward the already "popular." You're lucky Leo, you reach tons of people each day via online and terrestrial radio -- being mentioned as a suggested follow on air (by actual, talking, rational human) would mean a lot more to most than being "featured" without explanation on Twitter (not to mention being helplessly farmed by bots disguised as n00bs). - Andy Sternberg from fftogo

Every system that gains popularity is subject to gaming, and it is Twitter's job (like Google's, Digg's, etc) to stave it off. - coldbrew

So now the new business model is, create startup, hire people to continually create ghost accounts to inflate subscriber numbers, ???, profit. >.> - pitlord from twhirl

Two good points @Andy - if, using legitimate methods that reach millions of people a week, I can't generate more than 500 new users a day, how are these people getting 5,000 new users a day? And as for the Friendfeed recommended users, this is an example of how to do it right - algorithmic recommendations based on who you're already following. I'm not sure how you make recommendations to totally new users, though - seems it would have to be a "Staff Picks" system as Twitter is using. - Leo Laporte

Leo: This is probably punishment for starting that "Twit" radio thingy of yours, which *totally* tries to play off the popularity of the Twitter brand. ;-) [Edit: Lest anybody take me seriously, that's a joke. TWiT predates Twitter.] - Ken Sheppardson

coldbrew - or charge for it. Anyone here angry that Google puts "sponsored links" at the top of your search results? Didn't think so. The problem is Twitter isn't be transparent AT ALL. How were these selected? Are they "paid" sponsor links? I don't think for a second that Twitter couldn't adopt the Google model and start charging for "placement" of users to boost follower count... of course that assumes there is somehow actual value in a high follow count (you can create $$$ from it). - Brian Roy

I know you're joking kshep - but just in case anyone doesn't know, the TWiT trademark predates Twitter by almost two years, and ev told me on net@night that they were aware of TWiT but decided to go with the name, Twitter, anyway. - Leo Laporte

Andy: but friendfeed's algorithm is objective, Twitters' is subjective. Friendfeed's has integrity (it is decided by an algorithm and is consistent in how it treats everyone). Twitter's does not (it is done by humans and is not consistent). Also, friendfeed does not only recommend 20 people. It goes forever (at least on my account it seems to, I can never reach the end). friendfeed also does not group one group together and let you add them with one click, so growth on all accounts is much more organic. - Robert Scoble

coldbrew: that's the rub. This is a game BY TWITTER ITSELF!!! If you play footsie with @ev you get added. If you don't, you don't. Like Leo is getting punished for being anti Twitter while people who put far lamer content into the system get rewarded. Footsie alert! :-) - Robert Scoble

Leo, I would say that Twitter seems to "get" transparency the same way the Obama administration does. >.> - pitlord from twhirl

Good points @Leo - personally I wish Twitter made better use of user favoriting. Some kind of algorithm to weigh recommendations would make it much more interesting. I've always liked how TEchmeme / Memeorandum does it. My snap reaction to A Fine Frenzy being on suggested list was -- figures, this is Jack Dorsey's kind of music. - Andy Sternberg

Robert -- don't you mean Twitter is subjective, FF objective ? - Brian Sullivan

Brian: yeah, I fixed that, sorry. - Robert Scoble

Robert -- what do you mean yours goes on forever -- your recommended list? I have only one page with 31 entries. - Brian Sullivan

Brian: I have 13,000 friends, remember? So my recommended page goes on a lot longer. I've tried to reach the end and can't. - Robert Scoble

I didn't realize that FF's recommendations were based on who you already follow. It seemed to me that I would always get similar recs no matter when I looked. Kevin Rose was always at the top of my FF recos despite teh fact that he didn't even have a picture for a long time and rarely seems to use the service. - Andy Sternberg

Obasanjo has a post up claiming Mr Tweet is the recommendation service of choice. - coldbrew

Robert: so the length of the list is determined by the number of people you subscribe to -- as well as who they are connected to? So the list potentially grows exponentially with the number of subscriptions? -- would seem to make it even less useful. - Brian Sullivan

@coldbrew - Obasanjo is right. We interviewed Mr Tweet on net@night some weeks ago, and he talked about the difficulty in creating a recommended list. Defining influence is very difficult. Mr. Tweet's blog post on this subject is excellent: http://bit.ly/LaKdz - Leo Laporte

I'm going to have to agree with Brian, as subscriptions go up so does everyone's popularity, this is the antithesis of scalable. - James

Hi Leo, good to see you up and arguing this topic! Just like everyone else, we were of course stunned to see the sudden rapid increase by some people. Initially, I thought it was Twitter's recommendations, but I thought it HAS to be circle of spammers after i noticed that you, scoble, etc were essentially not moving at all. Only recently then I realized that Twitter was probably selecting a group of people (about 50?) and recommending them. Anyway, we are still working on improving accuracy, it is hard! ;) - ming yeow

(Ming Yeow IS Mr Tweet, by the way!) - Leo Laporte

I mean this one thing is not going to bring them down. And a service like this has to have financial support, either through monetizing or being purchased by Google. So what will bring it down? I love FriendFeed, but it feels like a different space than this. It's like you need all of them and FF aggregates them. AOL was too closed. Myspace was too open. So whats the answer? Whether its Twitter or not, this is its own space. - Stephen Pickering

These conversations have been pretty long on here ... friendfeed is becoming the newsgroups and forums of the past - Nick O'Neill