Some high-profile Twitter accounts have been seeing astronomical jumps in the number of users subscribing to their profile updates — tens of thousands of new followers, in some cases.

A feature launched last month, called “suggested users,” contributed to the spike, explained Evan Williams, Twitter’s co-founder and chief executive.

As part of the sign-up process, new users are now shown a sort-of featured personalities list that includes a wide variety of popular people and companies. Included are U.K. newspaper The Guardian’s technology page, Web personality Felicia Day, TechCrunch, actor Rainn Wilson, computer maker Dell, grocer Whole Foods, the New York Times and CNN.

Since Twitter began endorsing a handful of personalities in mid-January, The Guardian was among several entities to reap a subscriber windfall. Its account jumped from about 4,000 followers to 66,000 in about a month, according to stat-tracking service Twitter Counter. And within the last two weeks, @GuardianTech added new users at a pace about 300% faster than the previous two weeks.

Day, an Internet video maven, experienced similar results. She has jumped from 20,000 to 83,000 since mid-January. TechCrunch went …

… from 41,000 to 111,000 in the same period. The New York Times’ Twitter account increased its subscriber base by a factor of six — to 145,000.

Williams said Twitter added the feature because many users fall off from the service quickly after singing up, likely because they’re not sure what to do next.

“The reason we created this feature is because lots of people sign up to Twitter but aren’t following anyone, so we’re trying to help get them started,” Williams wrote in a comment on a blog post about the follower phenomenon.

Some bloggers and Twitter micro-bloggers took issue with the approach. Since the service began, they said, many Twitter users have invested time and energy into building their user bases into a valuable resource. They complained that the changes interfere with that kind of organic growth.

“People who see the importance of Twitter start asking these kinds of questions,” said Leo Laporte, who runs the TWIT podcasting network and until recently was one of Twitter’s top five users. He is now the 27th-most popular user, according to Twitterholic.com. “Sometimes it’s a little bit concerning. Because Twitter has a lot of power to, with simple changes like that, change the ecology of the system.”

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone acknowledged that offering “suggested users” wasn’t the ideal solution and suggested that the service might evolve to cater to particular users’ interests. “Right now it’s sort of like staff picks at your local bookstore,” he wrote in an e-mail. “Later, we hope to make this smarter.”

But a more dynamic — and less subjective — recommendation system may not be coming any time soon. “It’s not super-high on the priority list,” Stone said.

Fair enough. But your staff picks include two New York Times accounts and not a single one of the LA Times’ 80 Twitter feeds? That’s a slap in the face, Twitter.

Just kidding. We’re still cool.

Updated 11 p.m.: An earlier version of this post said the LA Times has nearly three dozen Twitter feeds. There are actually 80.

– Mark Milian

[ via latimes ]

Popularity: 100% [?]

It seems everywhere you turn these days there’s an excitable story about Twitter, the microblogging tool that is a mystery to some people, a miracle to others, and a service some are noisily evangelizing in hope of self publicity.

As Twitter scales up in user numbers, the level of hysteria seems to be going through the roof. Along with a huge army of self proclaimed social media experts, most of whom appear never to have actually worked on or been around a grown up marketing campaign in their lives, we also have the bullhorn aggregator brigade – the folks that busily hoover up information and then breathlessly and sometimes bossily rebroadcast to anyone listening.

Old enough to remember when ‘desktop publishing‘ started to put the early crude digital graphic design tools into the hands of enthusiastic people with no design ability? That’s where the social media circus is in its development curve, with honorable exceptions.

Long form blogging went through a ‘trough of disillusionment’ to use analyst Gartner’s bizarre term, after the initial flurry of excitement a few years ago. After the initial burst of innovators we had great hordes of people who thought regurgitating other peoples ideas and thoughts was ‘blogging’. These people are still busily cutting and pasting and writing en masse and nobody is reading their stuff because they have nothing to say.

The same thing is increasingly happening, in a shorter format, with micro blogging. Just as the craze for RSS feed evidence that your long form blog must be interesting because of the number of ‘readers’, proudly displayed on the blog front page, we now have the ‘follower’ phenomenon – if thousands of folks are following you on Twitter that must mean you carry some weight in the universe.

There seems to be an odd momentum where the more Twitter followers you accumulate, the more folks follow you on the basis of your following. We’ve already had the Twitterank fiasco, where people signed up for a service which generated a meaningless number that supposedly gave you a ‘rank’ of importance, and there are various other free online ‘metrics’ services that massage your ego with evidence of your popularity.

I smell Beanie Babies, Housing Bubbles and Dutch Tulip Manias – there’s a frenzy around followers that will boom and bust.  Few people know why these various followers are of value apart from to try and sell to them, often in a way that would be very at home on the home shopping channel, ideas, services and stuff.

Apart from the folks who are flipping ideas – strip mining the web and in some cases their work experience for stuff they can repackage and rebroadcast, often within a very short time frame – there are the crowd sourcers.

Some of this crowdsourcing is innocuous timewasting – “what’s your favorite #westernfilm, friends? TGIF!” – and some questionable requests for information that will presumably be used for personal gain. There is even a strain of Twitter ‘Chuggers‘ (a UK term combining ‘charity’ and ‘mugger’ for people who accost you in the street and try to get you to sign up for the cause they represent, or at least donate to it).

In a business team environment any sort of collaboration device is usually preferable to  telephone calls, emails with attached MS Office files and all the other time eating one to one conversations that slow projects down.

There’s no denying microblogging is a useful, if largely insecure, collaboration tool: where instant messenging is basically a one to one communication tool, Twitter is a one to many device as I’m sure you’re sick of hearing by now.

Twitter, and an ever increasing number of business oriented clones, do have great utility if there’s a clear team use model.

On a public level however Twitter is all about who you’re listening to. Ever been to an overcrowded party? There’s often tons of complicated social hierarchy and hustle, some of which you don’t understand,  and you probably wind up talking to the people who seem the sanest and most interesting in a corner where you can hear yourself speak.

There’s an egomaniac making a lot of noise over there, a drama queen behind you, someone boasting about business to a large group of people they just met and someone else having a noisy emotional meltdown in the doorway. That’s what Twitter can be like.

Anyone who has managed people will know how the above party scenario applies to work as well – just add the shy and the poor communicators…

The above may seem hard on Twitter and those inside the tech bubble, but we are now approaching a point where this embarrassingly named service is increasingly going mainstream. Just as the ‘poking’ feature in Facebook hasn’t appeared in enterprise social network products, there are poking style aspects of Twitter which are confusing users who think it is merely an immature adolescent plaything.

Learning to filter out background noise and give and receive useful contextual information with people you value is the art of making Twitter useful. Like being at a party, just showing up doesn’t mean you’re going to have a good time. Quality not quantity is what builds reputation…

[ via zdnet.com ]

Popularity: 48% [?]