While reading the Google Blog today I followed their link to Google Follow Finder to kick it’s tyres. It’s a simple service, you type in your Twitter username, and it returns lists of people you may like to follow based on a follower-following graph. Of the 10 people (or accounts) returned for me (see below) I am already following 9 of them. I could be wrong, but this seems to counter purpose the app.

I clicked on the follow button to see how that functionality was integrated and I was presented with the authorisation approval screen, which I notice now uses the same ‘Connect’ terminology as Facebook.

I am not a fan of new browser windows that hide the address bar (which happened in Safari 4.0.4, but Firefox 3.6.3 was fine), as it reduces my confidence in the process. But I was so dizzy with curiosity, I threw caution to the wind and clicked the Connect button anyway. My hasty yet not totally irrational action resulted in the following error message:

This is because the callback API supplied is different to the one registered with the Twitter API. The problem stems from the fact that the link in the original blog post contains the ‘www’ subdomain. If you remove that and try again everything works as expected. Once I authorised Google Follow Finder it recognised the people I was already following. I am still at a loss as to why I am presented with this list though. More confirming than finding is going on.

I wonder has anyone found some sweet new followers with Follow Friend? Why have Google released this I wonder?