ReadWriteWeb

Last month, Twitter CEO and co-founder Evan Williams stated that he "desperately" wanted to retire the company's suggested user list - the list of Twitter accounts shown to new users of the service to help them find interesting people to follow. At the time, he hinted that it might evolve into something more "Twittery and democratic." But now, what was a "maybe" before has turned into a "definitely." Speaking at a conference in Malaysia, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told reporters that the suggested users list will be "going away" and "in its stead will be something that is more programmatically chosen, something that actually delivers more relevant suggestions."

Sociologist and ethnographer, Liz Pullen, spent a month tracking the top 500 Twitter users (as ranked by number of followers) as well as the much-contested suggested users list. In tracking these accounts, she also closely analyzed the behaviors of new adopters and their expectations of the service. Perhaps her conclusions will help us all understand - and hopefully improve - the dismal attrition rates for the service.

Are new users able to understand and take advantage of Twitter as a powerful tool? Or are they encouraged to think of it as yet another broadcast medium? Is the suggested users list a good strategy for improving new users' experience with Twitter? Most importantly, do we or should we use Twitter a social network, an information network, or a microblogging platform?

It's no secret that getting on Twitter's suggested user list will quickly drive a user's follower numbers up, but thanks to O'Reilly's Ben Lorica, we can now actually quantify this boost. Lorica, with the help of tools like Twitterholic and Twittercount, examined data from about 80 users who made it onto the suggested user list. On average, these users gained around 53,000 new followers after being on the suggested user list for a week. After 30 days, these users had gained almost 200,000 new followers on average.