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Filed under: Design, Social Software, web 2.0

Twitter's follower and following pages get a big redesign


If you've been on Twitter over the past day or so, you may have noticed some big changes to the way the site shows users' lists of followers and followees. Instead of just showing names and icon, these pages now display more detailed information, including location and most recent tweet. All of the actions you have available for each user are collected into a compact drop-down menu, so you can mention, direct message, block, follow or unfollow the user quickly.

Several users have correctly pointed out that the new design makes Twitter look a lot more like an iPhone-optimized site. It's definitely an improvement in many ways, but there's one small quirk I have to take issue with: in the old layout, the appearance of the "direct message" link next to a username gave a quick visual indication of whether that user was following you. You can still figure this out by clicking the drop-down menu, but it's definitely not as efficient as before. On the other hand, the new design does a great job of showing who you're following when you browse another user's list.

Filed under: Web services, Social Software

Twitterbelle: use favorites to find new people to follow

Favorites are a dramatically underused feature on Twitter, but if you know where to look, you can use them to find some people you might be interested in following. Twitterbelle is a new site that makes that process easier. Just put in the username of someone you think is interesting and has good taste in friends, and you'll see a list of the people he or she has awarded favorites to.

This is a bit more effective than just going down someone's following list, which will be chronological, not ranked, and sometimes extremely long. Maybe someone's following thousands of people, but favorites point out who they're really paying attention to. You can obviously also use Twitterbelle to check out your own favorites and see who's getting the most gold stars from you.

Filed under: Utilities, Social Software

FriendOrFollow: who's not following you back on Twitter?

FriendorFollowIf you're an obsessive Twitter user, you probably notice when someone stops following you. How do you figure out who it is, though? It can be tough, especially if you have a lot of followers. Well, now there's FriendOrFollow, a site that tells you who's not following you back, and who you're not following.

FriendOrFollow is handy for discovering new folks to follow, adding people you might have forgotten, and dropping people (if you're the type to ditch those who don't reciprocate.) FriendOrFollow is a lot like another service that's been around for a whie, Twitter Karma, but it's faster and more reliable. Since there's been more than one attempt to implement this functionality, there must be some kind of demand for it. Perhaps one day you'll see it built into Twitter.

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