I think this means Twitter has peaked. As in now they're trying hard to get existing users to "do more" (follow more people) because there's not many people signing up anymore. It's not like following people has been hard previously.
In exactly the same way that Facebook now doesn't have many people signing up, so instead they desperately keep shoving "People you may know!" at you, even though you've never heard of Ima Stalker before.
User acquisition will always peak at some stage for most companies (the universe being the total number of people with access to the internet), so the attempt drive more usage is not surprising.
I do believe, though, that Twitter has lost its way since end 2009 and are largely making stuff up as they go along. It is also fair to assume that they will have pressures to ramp up monetization as they run out of time to bridge the gap between potential and actual revenues. Such is the curse of an insanely high valuation.
EDIT - It seems the flow is a little different. The user doesn't have to connect to the site first; it's just a one-click thing if you're already logged in. Pretty cool, except it seems a little buggy if you have SSL enabled on your Twitter account.
This will be nice for those of us who use twitter as simply a news stream rather than a social tool. If I like a blog, I'd rather click the follow button on the blog itself rather than looking up the username and doing it through the twitter profile page.
Oh come on. We've had this discussion about RSS before (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2060298 was the last big one), and plenty of people are using it in some capacity.
An order of magnitude fewer people use RSS than use Twitter, but fewer people use Twitter for the use case that RSS serves than use RSS for that purpose.
I disagree. I think more people get their news from Twitter by following people they want to receive news from. What's more, the number of such people grows everyday, far faster than for RSS.
Yeah it was intended for people who don't understand RSS (or who, like me, subscribe to 800 feeds. The problems are the same at both ends of the spectrum).
And yes I'm sure there's lots wrong with it. I built a recommendation system, but I stopped hacking on it when I realized that people liked a story more if I lied that their friend shared it. That's what twitter has: social proof.
what I wanted to say is, your app needs a designer's touch. f.ex. http://goodnoows.com/ has a nice feeeling (although I don't use it, partly because I even can't import my netvibes opml in there)
I think it makes more sense to have the button match the language of the page content. It would be a bit jarring to see a single Japanese button on an otherwise English page.
It's just a button, is this really worth the hoopla? I find it funny how Twitter can make the deal out of the most ordinary thing, like Fail Whale and of course the "Follow Button".
In exactly the same way that Facebook now doesn't have many people signing up, so instead they desperately keep shoving "People you may know!" at you, even though you've never heard of Ima Stalker before.