Of all twit­ter add-on ser­vices, Mr. Tweet has sur­prised me most dur­ing the last week. That basic aim of the ser­vice is to let you find folks in whose tweets you might be inter­ested in. Since twit­ter is still grow­ing so rapidly, topic-specific selec­tion becomes more and more inevitable. Yet while I’m quite sure that in the long run the retweet-rate will act as twitter’s “back­link fac­tor”, Mr. Tweet intro­duces a well thought-through rec­om­men­da­tion system.

Basi­cally, Mr. Tweet is one of those ser­vices you have to trust enough to hand over your twit­ter account data — that’s the one thing I don’t quite like about it, yet still the sur­plus value is great. On each twit­ter users pro­file page a num­ber of sta­tis­ti­cal data presents an overview of the type of twit­ter who’s at work here: Updates per day, per­cent­age of con­ver­sa­tions, posted links plus addi­tional notes (like “usu­ally fol­lows back”) give a bet­ter impres­sion about the realness/spammyness of any account:

And there’s more: the ser­vice reg­u­larly pro­vides very inter­est­ing twit­ter tuto­ri­als as well as sug­ges­tions for new fol­lows — and these work really well in com­par­i­son to what Twit­ter itself has to offer:

Twitter’s sug­ges­tions for me include a gro­cery store, the microblog of an online shoe store CEO and a mommy blog­ger. On the other hand, Mr. Tweet has actu­ally rec­om­mended peo­ple I have met or at least know professionally.

The founders of the com­pany refer to their ser­vice as a per­sonal net­work­ing agent, yet while this label sounds a bit exag­ger­ated, some truly juicy candy is hid­den inside the rec­om­men­da­tion sys­tem: Mr. Tweet encour­ages its users to ask for rec­om­men­da­tions by other users and to issue these to their own favorites users. Such rec­om­men­da­tions are tweets which look like this:

#MrTweet I rec­om­mend @username because [insert rea­son here]

Not only do these mes­sages raise aware­ness for ones account, their over­all num­ber is also used by Mr. Tweet’s fol­lower algo­rithm which deter­mines the follow-suggestions. Besides, you get to know some nice bits and pieces about other tweep­ers — so in other words: please go to Mr. Tweet and rec­om­mend me!

Since I really like the ser­vice and the idea, I’ll rec­om­mend one of my favorite twit­ter friends each day for the next two weeks. Using Tweet­later, that’s a breeze — even the sched­ul­ing option of the free ver­sion are great, but to har­ness the full power of pre-tweeting, I highly rec­om­mend the pro ver­sion, which enables you to sched­ule replies and direct messages.

Want some rec­om­men­da­tion love? Since I’m a big fan of rec­i­p­ro­cal net­work build­ing, of course I’ll gladly return to favor if you write a rec­om­men­da­tion for me!