“Who to follow” was suggesting people users already followed: Twitter says it’s fixed

This may not come as a shock to many, but Twitter’s “Who to follow” feature isn’t perfect. Since it launched recently, many Twitter users have complained that “Who to follow” often just suggests people that users have previously simply followed and then unfollowed sometime in the past.

This morning, however, the service seems to have taken a step backward (hopefully temporarily) by increasing offering suggestions to users of people they already follow.

UPDATE 1: Twitter has just temporarily turned off “Who to follow”, acknowleding that the feature was in fact doing what we reported. Here’s the short message they just left on the Twitter Status page:

“We’ve temporarily turned off the “Who To Follow” feature and will be restoring it as soon as possible. We were including people you already follow – we are investigating this issue.”

Also, we asked a third party expert on OAuth if this problem could be related to Twitter changing to OAuth today, and he responded, “doubt it’s related”.

UPDATE 2: At 2:15pm PST Twitter said that the issue has been resolved and has turned “Who to follow” back on. Twitter did not provide any further explanation.

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While this problem has been noticed by some users recently, it really seemed to pick up this morning, as we noticed many tweets complaining about this apparent malfunction, and a quick Twitter search for “Who to follow” shows plenty of people having the same issue:

We’ve emailed Twitter for comment, but the company does not usually comment on “user statistics” as it puts it. In the meantime, if you are really annoyed with the suggestions, you can do this hack (there are a few others) and remove them from your sight on Twitter.com