Two days ago http://friendfeed.com/louisgr... Louis Gray pointed out on FriendFeed that when a new user signs up for FriendFeed that they receive 24 suggested FriendFeed users to follow. I'm one of those 24. There is no mystery to how these 24 users are selected for promotion on the FriendFeed platform, they are simply the 24 FriendFeed users with the most followers. Once a user subscribes to someone this list changes. it roughly becomes the most popular people followed by their friend(s). And while Friendfeed's objective and simplified method of promoting users to new sign ups is probably better than Twitter's much criticized subjective method of elite favoritism, it could be vastly improved yet. - Thomas Hawk

But the "most popular" under this scheme is also self perpetuating is it not? Is that a good thing? Perhaps some sort of other automated suggestion list would be more appropriate? - Brian Sullivan

Yeah Brian, read the linked article :) He covers that sufficiently, I think... - Joel Bennett

Oh, and Thomas, maybe what you need are some imaginary friends: http://friendfeed.com/setting... (no, seriously). - Joel Bennett

I think rooms/groups or whatever they're calling it now should be featured more prominently for old and new users alike. That takes care of both the geography and the interests. - Eric P

Joel, Yeah, I've got a number of imaginary friends already set up from Flickr. But these are problematic as well. You can't share their stuff with other people on FF, you only see their flickrstream (I want to see their blog, their Flickrstream, their twitter acct, etc. all together), plus having to make these one by one is a pain. It would be much better if FF could just use the Flickr API to show me who is already on here among my 12,000+ contacts there and even better let me flickrmail invite people who are not here yet. - Thomas Hawk

Brian, yes, the suggested user list should *definitely* encompass more than just popularity. If you read my article above you'll see that I offer up a number of suggestions on how to improve/fix this. There are ways to deal with the self-perpetuation problem with the current system. - Thomas Hawk

Thomas this is a very good suggestion. Lets new users get out of the simple popularity based recommendations, and get more into interests and areas, which I very much like. Caters to the geeks and non-geeks alike. I especially like the "take 200 and randomize 24 out of the 200" -then even longer time users can go back to the list and get a fresh view. I think that if FriendFeed won't implement something like this, someone else should, but it would be best if we culd convince the FriendFeed crew to do so. - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

The Flickr API does indeed expose your contacts in terms of their user id and screen name on Flickr. FF could match this info against Flickr accounts that have been set up by FF users. - Ole Begemann

Ole, that would be my number one FriendFeed request. I'd love to be able to add all of my flickr contacts on FF that I'm not already following. I'd love to be able to invite all of those that are not here yet via the flickrmail system as well. - Thomas Hawk

The most distinct problem with the "popularity" based recommendations (here esp) is that they're totally oriented towards one group of people. If you don't like tech-journalists, you're not going to like the recommended list here now. I ALSO really like the idea about finding the new most active/popular users (the ones with less than 60days here) Great way to discover new talent. - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Thomas: Not much of a flickr user, aren't flickr / yahoo contacts integrated? (I guess they must not be) - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

One of the problems I see with the suggestions is they involve introducing more information requirements for the user to specify (geography, interests) which imply changes elsewhere in the system. Surely there is something simpler that can be done without that extra baggage to introduce some more randomness? - Brian Sullivan

Rob the new active/popular users tab would actually serve two purposes. it would be great for people like you and me to find new users to follow, but it would also provide valuable interaction to new active/popular users bringing them into the fold so to speak. I think some people sign up for FF and because they are new and unknown they get no interaction and get frustrated and quit. This would help them get exposure and engagement making their first impressions of the service better. - Thomas Hawk

what would be interesting is to ask the new user what they are interested in, then show the 24 people that have registered the same interests/tags in their FF stream. Like for example, Love comic books, comic book goodness, rapatton, me, and ect. That at least would be more "democratic", but then there I go thinking again :-) - Dan Morrill AKA Techwag

Rob, I'm pretty sure that my Flickr contacts are not integrated with my Yahoo mail. It would be cool if they were. Yahoo owns Flickr but the Yahoo mail and Flickr systems are still distinct as far as I'm aware. - Thomas Hawk

Dan, exactly. by letting us stipulate interests, friendfeed could create a suggested users by interests tab. I think you'd get a far different initial friendfeed experience if you had a tab for 24 (or even better paged) people interested in say photography than in the current 24 being promoted. Whatever your interests, music, guitar, comic books, movies, cooking, etc. I actually think the suggested users page should have tabs across the top letting users look at several different groups of people (popular/active, geographic, popular active/new users, hobby interests). - Thomas Hawk

The "suggested list" should go "both ways": to subscribe and unsubscribe. Friendfeed should give me a list of, from those I follow, the one's is "less worth" following (I have everything, don't click in their links, never like or comment...) - Marcos Marado

Tina & I pointed out this deficiency a while back in April where I cited an Allan Stern article which was perhaps the first to point out this lob-sidedness wayyyy back http://friendfeed.com/sofarso... kind of fell on death ears *shrug* I'm not a blogger - sofarsoShawn

Yahoo and Flickr contacts are completely separate. Thomas: Inviting people via FlickrMail is not straightforward because Flickr doesn't expose FlickrMail via the API. Understandable IMO for spam reasons. - Ole Begemann

I agree with your suggestions, as well that a good chunk of the current 24 are not really engaging in the conversation here and whilst popular don't really deserve to be on the recommended list. It would definitely be better to see people who are engaging more here... As opposed to just having their tweets feeding through. - Travis Koger

I haven't looked at the suggested list since last year. It was something very similar even then, people with the most followers were chosen, but they aren't always the most active people. I think there could be a different way to suggest people to new users, maybe a way that chooses suggested users by interest. - Candace