Who does Twitter think is your profile match?

Twitter introduced a feature this week that recommends three more people when you follow one, you may have seen it.

This raises the intriguing question  - who does Twitter think is your profile match?

If it’s true you can judge someone by the company they keep, the people Twitter are selecting to align with your profile will have a bearing on your online reputation.

Who does Twitter think are my peer group? Stephen Fry, Seth Godin? or is it wee Jock Poo-Pong McPlop, custodian of the Aberdeen public lavatories? – who I’ve just discovered has a LinkedIn profile!

To find out I conducted a simple experiment from another account and found my Twitter profile buddies to be  NMA’s, Andy Oakes, Amy Mae-Lee from Mashable and Local Social Summit AKA Dylan Fuller. Not bad associations for an agent of online pr.

Twitter are pretty vague about how they reach these recommendations saying: “The algorithms in this feature, built by our user relevance team, suggest people you don’t currently follow that you may find interesting. The suggestions are based on several factors, including people you follow and the people they follow.”

The objective of the feature is not online reputation testing of course but to help tweeters grow their networks  - the social networking equivalent of Amazon’s, ‘people who bought this, also purchased these’ idea.

One side effect is citizens of Twitterland will become even more choosy who they follow now – and so they should.