Whenever I go on Twitter (News - Alert), one of the first things I see is a list of people it recommends I follow that I either don’t know or have no interest in following. However, it seems Twitter is aware of that, and has a new feature for finding friends and people to follow, alerting you when your friends all add a new one.

Basically, whenever several of your friends add the same person within a certain time frame, Twitter will send you a direct message informing you of such. What you do with that information is entirely up to you, so you can follow rising stars, find an old friend, or just ignore it altogether.

In this case, the idea came from engineers looking at analyzing public Twitter data. Among said data is lists of who follows who, which they realized could be used to determine when someone has similar followers or follows the same people, like with Facebook’s (News - Alert) “mutual friends” list. In this case, though, it’s an actual notification just when it happens.

At the moment, Twitter does have a list of suggested people to follow, which is also based off the people you currently follow, and similar subjects of interest. This, however, means I often see recommendations to follow the Twitter accounts of TV shows I don’t watch, friends of friends who I don’t know, and for some reason, a “professional juggler.”

There may be some who don’t take kindly to receiving a message every time some of their friends follow someone new, but perhaps this service will be optional, so people can turn it off when they want. How often one will receive notifications will also vary depending on several factors, such as how many friends they have, how active they are, and how connected each of their friends are to one another. Still, for those looking for new friends or followers, this could prove a useful tool.