They say that companies that have a lot of your personal data don’t like to use it because you might get upset or freaked out, but perhaps that is just an excuse to cover for the fact that even though they have a lot of your data, they don’t know how to use it properly.
Take Twitter for example…
I’ve used Twitter since 2008, and posted over 6,000 times. I follow a wide range of people, from astronauts to authors. It’s an eclectic group. Twitter should know me. I started Tweeting in the UK, mainly about the Start-Up scene there, but also about the sport of professional sailing. I lived in Melbourne for a while and go back regularly, that probably explains why I follow Australian cartoonists and ambassadors. I live in Dubai, and Twitter knows that – or should do.
And yet, this is the result of Twitter’s ‘Who you should follow’ algorithm yesterday.
Granted, as a citizen of the world, I follow American politics, I regularly read articles from the ‘Failing’ Media as a fan of good journalism, but this list seems… lazy.
It’s like Amazon’s ‘People who bought this, also bought’ but circa 1999. It’s the equivalent of saying, you liked Iron Man, therefore you will like Iron Man 2.
While everyone is getting excited about Big Data, Machine Learning, Marketing Automation and personalisation, in this case, it seems to be failing.
It’s not just a bad customer experience in the short term. One of the downsides of Social Media is the tendency to cocoon yourself in a bubble of people who you agree with. Discovery, something that old-media enabled through editors is limited. I’m pretty sure that the ‘Archived Tweets’ of Barack Obama while important for posterity is not an account that I will get much value out of.
The purpose of the ‘Who to follow’ feature is to be surprised, not bored.
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