Twitter is introducing a new Tab to its redesigned social dashboard. Depending on which test you're part of, you may already see "People" or "Find People" just to the right of the Messages link at the top. This new feature is the culmination of Twitter's work to enhance your experience within the rapid-fire micro information exchange. While this isn't Tweet-stopping news, it is important.
By clicking through, we open a window that allows us to look beyond our egosystem to explore the topics and tweeple who also contribute to the Twitterverse. Doing so reveals that our world is in fact, not flat. And, we also discover parallel universes that could benefit from our connection as well as benefit our social existence.
This is about who we know and who we should know.
We teach.
We learn.
We grow.
As a result...the magnetism of the network grows stronger, until it becomes part of our human nature, an extension of who we are and what we do. Indeed, Twitter is gradually migrating us from social graphs to interest graphs. Why? Because Twitter needs us to grow and shape our connections to keep us focused on our attention streams and to cultivate a rich landscape of contextual networks or nicheworks around interests, topics and memes. Aside from creating a valuable exchange for information commerce, interest graphs improve how people learn, discover, share and communicate. Nicheworks are also incredibly monetizable and may in fact, represent the future of marketing, service, and advertising.
Who to Follow
WTF (couldn't resist) introduces us to the people who are connected to friends and friends of friends as well as those whose Tweets echo similarities to our own. Here we learn more about people, their recent Tweets and are given the ability to follow them or add them to a list on the spot.
Once on the WTF page, we're presented with new tabs to help us expand and refine our interest graph, "Browse Interests" and "Find Friends."
Browsing interests is also extremely intuitive. Simply browse top-level topics and Twitter's human algorithm introduces you to a qualified set of individuals and branded accounts. This same technology will eventually escalate beyond connections as we start to explore the world of social networks and conversations to predict behavior, outcomes, and events.
Interest graphs aren't limited to Twitter. Every social network competing for your attention and connections will nurture the maturation of social and interest graphs. As architects of our own online experiences, it improves how quickly relevant information and people find us, our ability to develop and better our online persona, and ultimately how we positively affect those who follow us.
(h/t TechCrunch)
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