Twitter ‘Follow Recommendations’ Let You Make A Personalized ‘Suggested User’ List
Grace Chu Lee from Twitter's Business Development team earlier tweeted out and then deleted a Twitter feature that has as of yet gone unheard of beyond a select few, “Follow Recommendations.”
Context & Ripple Effects
This lands mid-sprint on Twitter's part. Within two weeks of the leak the company had cut [[a:|Promoted Trends pricing]] — actually, per the corpus record it dropped the daily rate to $120,000 on June 9 — lined up celebrity sponsored tweets, rolled out automatic link shortening on Twitter.com, and begun shipping a rebuilt Twitter search, while revenue chief Adam Bain was telling marketers that 80% of engagement is link clicking. Discovery and distribution are being rebuilt as commercial surfaces.
Against that backdrop, a Business Development employee tweeting out — then deleting — an unheard-of "Follow Recommendations" feature reads less like a product slip and more like a window onto the next phase: letting users compose their own personalized version of what had been Twitter's centrally curated Suggested User List. The delete button suggests it was not meant for public view yet.
First-order effects
- If shipped as described, users stop depending solely on Twitter's one-size-fits-all Suggested User List and can assemble personalized follow suggestions, directly changing how new accounts surface to audiences.
- The leak forces Twitter's hand on roadmap disclosure: a feature its own Business Development team exposed publicly now has to be either confirmed, explained, or quietly shelved.
Second-order effects
- Personalized follow recommendations open new advertising inventory adjacent to the products Twitter is actively repricing — advertisers paying $120,000 per day for Promoted Trends have an obvious interest in paid placement inside whatever replaces the static suggestion list.
- Accounts that currently owe their growth to inclusion on the curated list lose that guaranteed distribution if algorithmic or user-composed lists become the default path to first followers.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, follow-graph formation shifts from editorial curation by Twitter staff to recommendation systems shaped partly by commercial incentives — the platform, not the user's manual choices, increasingly decides whose audience you join.
- That makes the recommender itself the scarce asset: whoever controls suggestion ranking controls attention distribution on the network, a shift regulators and publishers tend to scrutinize once it reaches feed level.
The trend: Social platforms are replacing hand-curated user suggestions with personalized, commercially entangled recommendation systems, and Twitter's 2011 experiments mark the early edge of that transition.