14 DAY TRIAL // Twitter is now testing a small but very interesting feature. It enables users to see the common people they are following. The feature is very similar to Facebook’s friends in common and, though not as crucial to Twitter, it is such a useful tool that it’s a wonder Twitter didn’t introduce it earlier. The mutual follow feature is now in testing with about ten percent of Twitter users, but the social network has confirmed it and is saying that progress should be fast.
In practice, it works pretty much as you’d expect it. When you visit a profile page of a user, a list of contacts you have in common shows up above the Following list. It features the avatars of a number of people you have in common and you can expand it to show all mutual contacts. While Twitter is not exactly a social network in the strictest sense, this feature should be very welcomed and should really have an impact on how people interact on the microblogging platform.
While the social aspect has always been a part of Twitter, its one-way follow model, while great for celebrities and Twitter ‘opinion makers,’ doesn’t work so well with real friendships. The “you both follow” feature also adds a new layer of data to show users how they may be connected to each other, making it easier to decide whether to follow a particular user or not.
Of course, Twitter could take it one step further and use these connections to recommend people you should follow, based on the ones your friends do. Facebook does this already and it would be a useful way of finding interesting people on Twitter. The feature is still in testing and Twitter may not even roll it out at all. At the very least, the functionality, which admittedly is rather limited, could change by the time it is rolled out to everyone. One thing’s for sure, you can expect more of these types of new features to come from Twitter.