Twitter announced changes to its site on Thursday afternoon that will update the way Suggested Users List (SUL) work.
The SUL is now organized by categories, including Music, Sports, Technology, and many others. Clicking on any these topics generates 20 Twitter users within that category who the new algorithms think you should follow.
“We’ve created a number of algorithms to identify users across a variety of clusters who tweet actively and are engaged with their audiences,” writes Josh Elman, from Twitter’s product team. “These new algorithms help us group these active users into lists of users by interests.”
Just for fun, Twitter has created a set of “Staff Picks,” hand-picked Twitter employee favorites. They’ve additionally set up a “Staff Picks for Haiti” group, filled with Twitter users delivering the latest news from Haiti.
Twitter suffered a serious drop-off in new users starting last fall, according to a report released this week by HubSpot Inc. Whereas in the spring Twitter had seen its growth rate at around 13%, by October of the same year that rate had dwindled to 3.5%. Though HubSpot says current Twitter users are actually becoming better at what they do on the site, the microblogging site will definitely need to make some expansive changes to the site if it wants to maintain its prominence it has been building for so long.
Making headlines for tweets from President Obama and a new account from Bill Gates won’t carry the service forever.
Elman says the updated SUL is the first of many changes that will be coming to Twitter.
