Remember back in the day when Twitter follower email notifications basically only told you a person’s username? Yeah, those were pretty useless. Luckily, we’re far beyond that. And a new addition today makes these notifications more useful than ever.
Over time, Twitter has added things like profile pictures, stats (number of tweets, following/followers), and most recently, list stats and bios. But a new addition allows you to see just how many people you follow also follow the person requesting you. And it shows you how many people the user follows that you also follow.
Both of those features have been implemented recently on twitter.com itself — but the key here is that these are now in the email notifications you receive. This makes it very easy to tell if this new person following you is someone you’d also like to follow. Previously, I would almost always have to click through to a person’s Twitter page to see if they’re someone I wanted to follow (well, after they passed my quick “Golden Ratio” test) based on looking at information like this.
Just about the only thing now missing from these email is the most recent tweet — or group of most recent tweets, to see what this person actually tweets about. I wouldn’t be surprised if Twitter adds that one of these days.
This is all a part of Twitter’s moves to bulk up their social graph.
Update: The DM notifications have been updated too to show profile cards and now include a big blue “Send a direct message” button.