Thinking on Twitter's Suggested Users List (SUL)

Twitter has a Suggested Users List (SUL), which is for the new comer to get started in Twitter's following-followed game. The SUL has been critisized by lots of people since it's online.

It created two levels of users, insiders and outsiders
It screwed with the integrity of every person and organization that was on the list, or who hoped to be on it.
It destroyed the value of the one potential metric for authority, follower count.

Dave Winer has great posts on the dilamma of the SUL. It seems Twitter is serious about the list and they update it now to a new one with categories.

They use certain algorithm to generate the list , and try to make people believe that the list is fair, not controlled by human power or money power.

We’ve created a number of algorithms to identify users across a variety of clusters who tweet actively and are engaged with their audiences. These new algorithms help us group these active users into lists of users by interests. Rather than suggesting a random set of 20 users for a new user to follow, now we let users browse into the areas they are interested in and choose who they want to follow from these lists.

The interesting thing is the algorithm is not open to the outside world, how can people believe it's a fair play without knowing the rule of the play?

Since the SUL is definitely useful in many conditions, here are some ideas for the design:

1, Make it a A-Z catalogue if Twitter insists on a catalogue UI. No one will question the A-Z algorithm.

2, Patent the current algorithm behind the SUL and make it open to the outside。

This is just like the Google's pagerank technology, people have less questions when they can query/understand the rule in a game.

3, Make two lists. One is for people to pay to be there, the more they pay, the higher ranking they are on the list. The other list is either A-Z catalogue or list with algorithm open to the outside.

The SUL is useful but I don't think it's as important as "Search user" function on Twitter. Twitter should get more effort to improve the Search user, just leave the SUL as simple as it is. Think about Google Directory and Google Search, you'll know what I mean.