Twitter Pumps Up Follower Email Notifications Further With Social Graph Juice

Thursday, August 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

Remember back in the day when Twitter follower email notifications basically only told you a person’s username? Yeah, those were pretty useless. Luckily, we’re far beyond that. And a new addition today makes these notifications more useful than ever.

Over time, Twitter has added things like profile pictures, stats (number of tweets, following/followers), and most recently, list stats and bios. But a new addition allows you to see just how many people you follow also follow the person requesting you. And it shows you how many people the user follows that you also follow.

Both of those features have been implemented recently on twitter.com itself — but the key here is that these are now in the email notifications you receive. This makes it very easy to tell if this new person following you is someone you’d also like to follow. Previously, I would almost always have to click through to a person’s Twitter page to see if they’re someone I wanted to follow (well, after they passed my quick “Golden Ratio” test) based on looking at information like this.

Just about the only thing now missing from these email is the most recent tweet — or group of most recent tweets, to see what this person actually tweets about. I wouldn’t be surprised if Twitter adds that one of these days.

This is all a part of Twitter’s moves to bulk up their social graph.

Update: The DM notifications have been updated too to show profile cards and now include a big blue “Send a direct message” button.

Company: Twitter
Website: twitter.com
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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