Social Graph In Mind, Twitter Starts Prompting Users To Fill Out Their Profiles

Friday, February 26th, 2010

MG Siegler is a general partner at CrunchFund and a columnist for TechCrunch, where he has been writing since 2009. His focus is on Apple. Prior to TechCrunch, MG covered various technology beats for VentureBeat. Originally from Ohio, MG attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI. He’s previously lived in Los Angeles where he worked in Hollywood and in... → Learn More

When it comes to user discovery, the best way for services to do it is to use your profile information. Basic things like your name, location, bio, and email are all helpful ways for other people to find you on a network. The problem is that a lot of users don’t bother to fill this out when they sign up for a service. So Twitter is now prompting existing users to do so.

A new overlay has started popping up on the service called “Be found on Twitter.” This randomly appears (it did for me a few minutes ago) when you load up twitter.com. It reads, “We were hoping you could help us make it easier for people to discover their friends and colleagues on Twitter. Review your settings below to make sure the people you care about can easily find you.” It then asks for your name, bio, location, email, and phone number. If you’ve already filled these out, it includes what you previously put down.

Both the bio and location fields are optional, but everything else, you need to fill out (unless you click on “Ask me later” which presumably will bring up this prompt again). You can also decide whether or not to let people find you by your email address or phone number in searches.

Looks like Twitter wants to tighten that social graph a bit. With site growth in the right direction again, and tweeting at an all time high, it’s probably a good call. Now, if only they had a tool like this to help you sort through the people you no longer want to follow.

Company: Twitter
Website: twitter.com
Launch Date: March 21, 2006
Funding: $1.16B

Twitter, founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in March 2006 (launched publicly in July 2006), is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to post their latest updates. An update is limited by 140 characters and can be posted through three methods: web form, text message, or instant message. The company has been busy adding features to the product like Gmail import and search. They recently launched a new site section called “Explore” for...

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