@TwitterSuggests is an experimental feature from Twitter that began in January of this year, which helps users find interesting new accounts to follow. It does this by tweeting out who to follow suggestions that are personalised to the user and will appear in their @mentions folder.

It looks like a regular account, but is tied into an algorithm that generates suggestions of users to follow and sends them out.

@TwitterSuggests certainly isn’t shy about its recommendations – as of today the profile has sent out over 2.3 million tweets.

Here’s how it looks:

Currently @TwitterSuggests is sending out recommendations to a small percentage of Twitter users on an experimental basis, and you cannot opt in. You may, however, see your account being recommended to other users, as I did on Friday.

If you’re part of the experiment and don’t like the results you can opt out – to do this, you will need to block @TwitterSuggests (which seems a little harsh, but there you go).

Follow @TwitterSuggests (over 40 thousand people do) and you’ll see all the recommendations that it makes in your profile timeline, which could be a convenient way to find new people to follow.

The idea is a good one but (as with most things Twitter) the delivery has been a little buggy. Earlier this year @TwitterSuggests came under fire after it started recommending both dormant and NSFW accounts to users, but Twitter has continued modifying the algorithm and things have started to improve. Whether it will ever be truly useful to users remains to be seen.