Today, Twitter announced a new search feature designed to help users find accounts worth following, based on your personal interests. The tool is supposed to show you suggested users when you search on any term, but I couldn’t get that to work (I guess this is a really new feature). It also will show you suggested people to follow on a “who to follow” tab, which you can access from your Twitter home page, as you can see below.
Unfortunately, Twitter’s list of accounts to follow under “politics” isn’t all that new or interesting. First of all, it’s the same list of people you will find if you are already using the Twitter mobile client and have stumbled onto the bottom of the search tab, where you can find suggested users below the list of trending search terms. They’re grouped by topic: “Art & Design,” “Books,” “Business,” etc, all the way down to “Travel,”, “Twitter,” and helpfully if incongruously, “Voices in Egypt.” I’ve been keeping an eye on the “Politics” list of suggested users on my mobile, and thus today’s announcement from Twitter is actually kind of disappointing, because it doesn’t look like anything’s been done to update their list. Here’s the first 25 of the 82 accounts listed, in order of how they appear:
@CarlyforCA (Carly Fiorina, whose Senate campaign flopped and who hasn’t tweeted since November 2010)
@RasmussenPoll (Scott Rasmussen, whose polls are generally seen as strongly tilted to the right)
@cnnbrk (CNN Breaking News)
@HouseFloor (An open govt project by @timtom)
@michelemalkin (Michelle Malkin, the fire-breathing rightwing blogger)
@johnboehner (Republican Speaker of the House, that is)
@aclu
@chucktodd (Chuck Todd, TV politics nerd supreme)
@thenation (The Nation, America’s oldest weekly, on the left)
@gstephanopoulos (George Stephanopoulos, another TV politics nerd)
@cspan (Politics nerd homebase)
@FP_magazine (Foreign Policy magazine)
@anamariecox (Ana Marie Cox, for old times sake?)
@SenateFloor (The other half of @timtom’s open govt project)
@thehill (The Hill newspaper)
@AndersFoghR (What, you don’t already follow Anders Fogh Rasmussen*, the secretary general of NATO?)
@nytimeskrugman (Paul Krugman of the NY Times, who just tweets links to his columns and blog posts)
@politico (Politico)
@mikeallen (Politico’s Mike Allen, the hyper news nerd)
@glennbeck
@rollcallpols (Roll Call newspaper)
@drudgereport (Matt Drudge)
@kruddMP (Kevin Rudd, everyone’s favorite Australian Foreign Minister)
@washingtonweek (the least watched of Washington’s weekly windbag shows)
@SuzanneMalveaux (the CNN White House correspondent)
In case you’re wondering, the top 25 suggested users for “politics” include 6 people clearly on the partisan right, 2 on the left (I’m not counting the ACLU or Ana Marie Cox there), and a bunch of media outlets. The full list is slightly better, but includes other clunkers like @MegWhitman, @KeithOlbermann, and the far right radio madman Mark Levin. It includes some think tanks and more TV talkers. But many of the best and most interesting tweeters on politics are nowhere to be found.
Until now, I hadn’t thought this mattered all that much, since Twitter pretty much kept this list hidden on its mobile app (unlike the original Suggested Users List, which was a source of much consternation and insider backscratching, as Dave Winer often pointed out). But now that they’re promoting these recommendations on their search results and on every user’s home page, perhaps we could get a refresh?
*And what’s up with putting two Rasmussen’s on the top politics list?