Twitter Makes Your Followers Public

Last night, Twitter made a subtle change to their website: you can now view other peoples’ followers. While not significant, I used to frequently wonder why Twitter doesn’t let me see who’s following other users. While browsing through Mike Arrington’s 16,000+ followers or Veronica Belmont’s 19,000+ followers would take days, it helps users get a whole picture of individuals’ full social network.

Browsing through somebody else’s followers is also a great way to find other interesting users. While most people on Twitter still seem to be early adopters and interested in social media, if the site ever goes mainstream, having a complete picture of social connections on the site will be useful in mapping clusters of individuals. Aside from that there isn’t much that can be accomplished by viewing other peoples’ followers.

One feature that would be useful for leveraging the complete picture of the Twitter social graph would be friend recommendations. Twitter has continued to experience explosive growth over the past month according to the most recent Alexa charts. As the site crosses the chasm into mainstream adoption it will be interesting to see if the site can maintain reliability (which has already been highly criticized).

Do you see any other uses for accessing other users’ list of followers?