Twitter’s Who-To-Follow Directory

We discussed here the lack of  personalized-trends mechanism in Twitter. This seems to be something holding Twitter back from becoming a more broadly applicable system – it makes Twitter a weak personal communication and information system (unless your personal homepage is TMZ, anyway).

In fairness, Twitter does provide a “Who To Follow” directory. Here’s an example for the “Technology” area of interest:

The selection mechanism seems to be number of followers. This is fine as far as it goes – though it does remind me of those old Yahoo Internet directories from the late 90s.

It doesn’t give you any sense of what is going on today amongst your slice of the Twitter community. It is rather static. It feels a little like a newsservice, a little top-down.

On Techcrunch, commenting on the UserStreams of Twitter for MAC, MG Siegler wrote:

[…] when you actually start to have a conversation with people and can see them responding to you in realtime, it becomes more like an IM service instead of the way we’ve typically viewed Twitter: with static one-off messages and maybe a reply here or there.

So Twitter-for-MAC comes closer to the idea of seeing your personalized and relevant community on Twitter in action – but it is purely real-time vs. taking advantage of trending, and only looks at your direct followees, too.

Is there an entry-point for a startup between UserStreams and traditional Twitter trending?