Mr. Tweet and Unmet Expectations

I’m not exactly sure what I thought I was getting into when I decided to give Mr. Tweet a try. They advertise their service as “Who Should I Follow? – Mr. Tweet looks through your extended network to help you build effective relationships on Twitter.”

To me, that meant they were going to check out my current network, and the things I tweet about, and help me find some folks I don’t know about, who would add to my Twitter experience.

That’s not what I got, at all. More than a week (maybe 2 weeks?) after I asked Mr. Tweet to give me some recommendations, I finally got them yesterday, and was immediately disappointed. I was greeted with page after page of uber-popular A-List people. These were not people I wasn’t following because I didn’t know about them, they were people I had already made a conscious decision not to follow, because they aren’t all that relative to what I’m doing. In a nutshell, all Mr Tweet turned out to be was yet another “friends of friends” service. Yes, more than 100 people I follow also follow folks like Leo Laporte, Scoble, Guy Kawasaki, Kevin Rose, etc. So what? By suggesting that I should follow these people just because lots of other people follow them, doesn’t really help me find people I don’t know about.

Again, I already know these people are on Twitter and made the decision not to follow them! Mr. Tweet isn’t providing me any new information, it’s just spitting out the most popular twits, because some of the people I do follow also follow them. That is an overly simplified and borderline useless basis for suggestions. Individuals have a great many interests, just because one of our’s overlaps, does not mean that they all do.

In the meantime, I’m still looking for folks twittering about the things that do interest me, well. Hopefully, some service will step into the marketplace with something more than “friends of friends”, eventually.

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