So many Twitter apps, so little time! Today I played around with Twubble, a cool app that analyzes your Twitter friends and then recommends others that you might like to follow. Pretty interesting if you are looking to expand your follow lists, but don’t really want to look through the follow lists of all your friends. After running the analysis, Twubble recommended about 30 additional people for me to follow. It looks like one way they did it was to pick people that were being followed by at least two people that I followed. Here is what my Twubble looked like:
I liked all the recommendations — with the exception of one: I found it ironic, funny, and irritating that Bill Gates was the first person to come up in the recommended list. I know that this happened because he joined Twitter this week, making national news, garnering over 100K followers in like 8 hours, thus many of the people I follow are following him and so he rose organically to the top.
But, I have to admit that when I saw him appear at the top of the list, it popped into my head briefly that the recommendations were rigged to put him first. Absolutely ridiculous, I know. So, let me reiterate: I don’t seriously think the Twitter apps developers made deals with the Bill Gates people. I’m just irritated at this whole brouhaha about him joining Twitter.
I don’t want to follow Bill Gates on Twitter, and I find it irritating that he joins just to promote his web site and attracts so many followers in such a short time. There is no authenticity in that, and one of the things I find most compelling about social media is the potential for authenticity.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I guess the real reason I find all this so irritating is that after working for Oracle for 10 years, I was indoctrinated by Larry Ellison to dislike Bill Gates. 
Now if Larry popped up at the top of my Twubble list, I’d be thrilled to follow him…
Thoughts?
Paige
Posted by Paige 
