You're not on Twitter's suggested user list but you are in good company:
OK, so when Twitter came out with its Suggested User List I went through a bunch of emotions. Hatred. Jealousy. Self loathing. Blaming. Anger. Denial. All that kind of stuff.
Context & Ripple Effects
The timing matters: this reaction lands the day after Twitter confirmed closing a large round with Insight Venture Partners, T. Rowe Price, Institutional Venture Partners, Spark Capital, Benchmark Capital and Morgan Stanley, against confirmed pressure to start making money two years in — Biz Stone has publicly denied any plan for ads in 2009, so the rumored ~$100 million raise remains unconfirmed but the monetization question is live.
Against that backdrop, the 2007 Tweeterboard debate over who 'deserves' follower status was an early skirmish; the Suggested User List turns that status question into infrastructure, because Twitter now decides by default whom every new account follows. Scoble's omission — and his candid run through denial and anger — is the reaction of a power user discovering that distribution is no longer organic.
First-order effects
- Excluded high-profile users like Scoble lose the default-subscription channel that hands listed accounts large follower counts at every signup, while Twitter gains direct leverage over which voices new users encounter first.
Second-order effects
- List placement becomes a currency: media figures and brands will compete and campaign for slots, and if Twitter ever needs revenue beyond the ads path Stone ruled out for 2009, curated placement is an obvious asset sitting on the shelf.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, consumer platforms shift reach decisions from organic following to centrally curated defaults, making whoever controls the suggestion layer the effective broker of new-user attention — the structural endpoint the Tweeterboard-era status arguments pointed toward.
The trend: Consumer social platforms are consolidating the routing of new users' attention into centrally curated defaults, turning list placement into a form of distribution capital.