It’s good to see that Twitter is has introduced the new “You
Both Follow” feature, which lets you look at a Twitter user and see whom you
follow in common. My first reaction was “what took so long?” After all, one of
the key inputs to any social system (online or off) is identifying who you have
in common with other participants. Similar features have been available in other
social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn for quite a while.
Since You Both Follow has only been rolled out to 10% of the user base, here's a screen shot of it (courtesy Mashable):
While they’re at it, here are a few similarly obvious features that Twitter should add right away:
You’re Both Followed By: this is the flipside of You Both
Follow. Who are the people who follow both you and the Twitter user you’re
viewing. This is probably just as important as You Both Follow; when assessing
the credibility of another user, seeing that they are followed by people you
respect makes you more likely to follow them as well.
Are they following me? Today, when I look at a user on
Twitter, I can easily see whether I am already following the user. But, there’s
no indication of whether they are following me. How many times have you tried
to DM someone, only to see that they are not following you? A simple indicator “@graubart
is following you” would make life a lot easier.
The ability to mine the social graph is a huge opportunity and there's no reason Twitter shouldn't expose these simple queries. Yes, there are ways to get at this info through third party sites, but it should be bundled right into the product.
And, while they're at it, the third feature Twitter should add is the temporary mute feature. When users are at a conference and are hyper-tweeting, or even getting a bit overenthusiastic during a sporting event (sorry to those not interested in the #StanleyCup), there should be a way to mute them. There are a few 3rd party tools that do this such as TweepSnooze or my favorite, Muuter (which supports user and/or keyword muting), but this should be part of the basic Twitter toolkit.
In addition to making these enhancements through the Twitter
UI, these features should also be accessible through their API so that third
party clients like TweetDeck and Seesmic can implement them as well.
