Google Buzz Adds a “Who to Follow” Tool

Twitter has been adding several ‘follow suggestion’ features and reactions have been mostly good. Google is now doing the same with suggestions for Buzz, enabling users to start following people who may be of interest to them.

Appropriately, Google made the announcement on its Buzz Team feed. The feature itself is nothing revolutionary, in fact Buzz actually did something very similar when it was launched, leading to a less than warm reception from users.

“[S]tarting today, the next time you load up the Buzz tab in Gmail, you may see just that: suggestions for new people you might be interested in following,” the Buzz team wrote in the official feed.

“These suggestions are based on your frequent email/chat contacts, your public connections on other networks, and their activity on Google Buzz,” the announcement explained.

The feature is basic, it looks at your contacts as well as the people you already follow and suggests others that may interest you or may be connected to you.

Facebook has been doing something similar for years and the feature has helped drive up user engagement. Twitter has recently started offering suggestions on the profile pages.

Just like Facebook, Twitter looks at the ones you follow, the users they follow as well and makes the connections. It doesn’t have to be very sophisticated for it to work and the suggestions prove useful enough a lot of times.

“Only people who have public Google profiles will appear as suggestions. If you see a suggestion you like, you can choose to follow them right from there. If you never want to see a suggestion for a particular person again, click ‘Ignore’,” Google explained.

It’s interesting to note that one of Buzz’s most touted features at launch, and the one that would end up hurting it the most, was auto-follow. Buzz automatically followed the ones you had the most email conversations with and it worked on pretty much the same principles as the new “who to follow” feature.