holistic business development: Twitter’s “Followed By” And “You Both Follow” More Useful Than “Mutual Friends”

16. August 2010

Twitter’s “Followed By” And “You Both Follow” More Useful Than “Mutual Friends”

On Friday Twitter launched a mass roll out of the "Followed By" and "You Both Follow" features, which we previously covered last month (It seems as though Tlists, a feature which allows users to see what Twitter lists you are on, have yet to hit critical mass). While Facebook and Foursquare have had "friends in common" social graph features for awhile, it's a little more difficult to directly convert these concepts to Twitter because the concept of "friend" v.s "follower"/"followed" is hard to parse. After playing with the features for a couple of days, they have proven to be incredibly useful, as or if not more useful (and definitely more grammatically correct) than “Who To Follow, and especially more useful than Facebook’s "Mutual Friends," despite the fact that Twitter allows for one-way relationships whereas Facebook is by design two-way, where both parties have to agree on the relationship to connect.