Twitter’s near real-time search capabilities and the ability for them and third parties to mine the collective data from user messages for indicators of what’s buzzing online is the intrinsic core value of the company now that it has grown to the size it is at the moment.
We already know Twitter can be quite the source for breaking news, but critics have in the past correctly pointed out that one should be aware of the fact that the mob isn’t always right, and unverified claims on the micro-sharing service – often from a single user or even a single message – can quickly lead to false or incomplete stories circulating rapidly and viciously until the dust settles and the truth surfaces. And even then, it’s often too late as most people will have probably moved on unless it was a topic they have a continued interest in. Case in point: the Prop8 debacle.
Up until recently, Twitter’s trending topics – which are prominently displayed on their Search homepage and now also in the sidebar when you’re using the Twitter website – were an awesome way to get a feel of what was buzzing on the Web, in a way that virtually no other web service was able to do. And even if you couldn’t quite make sense of why a certain word, term or hashtag was trending, wiki-based services like WhatTheTrend were able to lay it out for you (most of the time, anyway). It was simply a great way to stay on top of news that was breaking online.
Which brings me to my rant. Today, when you look at Twitter’s trending topics, you’ll notice that the large majority of trends are memes started by a single user or a group of users, with the main goal offering entertainment rather than spreading information. That’s all fine and dandy – no harm in having fun – and I realize well that Twitter’s trending topics are not necessarily required to be giving you and me an overview of stuff that really matters, but I can’t help but think it’s a pity that that list is starting to turn into the top 10 of chain letters people used to circulate through e-mail messages in the late nineties.
Fine with me if people want to share what they consider to be lies that boys tell, or which 3 words should follow after sex, or what their moms used to tell them when they were little, but as I said before I think it’s a shame considering how powerful that trending feature and how valuable that list could be instead.
Maybe Twitter needs to add a feature that allows for people to customize that list by enabling them to remove topics out of their attention stream at the very least. We’ll make sure to add it to our list of 300 things we think Twitter should do before a TV show.
Totally agree. Good post. There should be way to select categories of search queries that are relevant to you.
talking twitter.. did TC see the top 100 songs on Twitter right now
Extremely cool and useful!
I have to agree. Awesome idea!
Really like the concept design and new music. BUT.
wah.fm (wearehunted own it) grabs the first result from youtube and sometimes more often than not the music you listen to is not very good.
Which is not so good
makes me start to wonder about the mining process for the actual songs are created.
Maybe twitter luver could share some light?
I agree, it is a bit annoying, but some are also fun, potentially they could have 2 catagories? Funny & News
Annoying. Yes. It feels more like being on myspace. I hope they create a fun category because this kind of chatter is only going to get louder.
None of it is news
TC, why the constant twitter blogging? is it the only technology that you understand?
The image you show citing the jones brothers acurately reflects all of the twitter content.
Isn’t this really a issue of a new type of spam? Because, essentially… that’s what this is, Twitter Meme Spam.
This is going to be a big challenge for Twitter and other services since it’s going to be very difficult to identify or classify single word hash tags as spam.
I wondering why TC didn’t post this earlier! Trending topics is such an amazing feature of a super-amazing system (search.twitter). Can’t believe how twitter is allowing such topics to deface it.
maybe your just saying that because Bing and Hulu is there and not Google Wave? It just goes to show that not everybody is talking about Wave… you guys cant take it, no? Wave is meeehhh… only MG and Arrington are excited about it.
Nah, I’m looking forward to trying Bing and suspect we’ll need to wait a long time for Wave to ‘change e-mail’ whatever that means. That said, one-word terms surface on the topics list faster.
I’m sure Michael Arrington is a little ticked his baby “Wave” is getting out twitted by Bing
http://www.tech...to-be-bing-day/
Is this a joke? Google Wave swiftly rose to the top…. overnight… and without the help of an $80 Million dollar marketing campaign.
Are you daft? Do you ignore dates?
Arrington’s post was posted LAST NIGHT, talking about YESTERDAY. As of YESTERDAY, wave was out twittered by bing, but Arrington was claiming that all people were talking about was Wave.
whatever – im starting the thing the writers, and most the commenters here are dopes.
haha i agree nathan
Actually, Google Wave is number 1 now.
I already suggested trending topics needs to be customizable in Mike’s “300″ post, as well as a bunch of other essential tweaks.
http://www.tech...comment-2765616
I’m still not quite sure why *only* my ‘30-second edit window’ was picked up, and everything else was ignored. Too much good stuff, eh?
Either way, this will take forever to happen. Instead, Twitter would rather focus on useless and semantically retarded functionality such as ‘likes’.
Just bookmark tweetizen.com – homepage always displays breaking news. Create your own breaking news twitter group!
Just saw your post – This looks very cool.
Totally with you about Trends and I acknowledged this earlier as well. Trends used to be the first place I checked but now it’s just Meme’s -
http://twitter....atus/1957323089
I’m starting to sound like an evangelist here, but I’m really interested in what Zensify have done with their iPhone app. Showing trending topics for my social graph is far more valuable to me than Twitter’s trends. Combined with groups it could become a really exciting tool.
Agreed. If i could have the trending topics among people i am following (and the people they are following, even 3 levels deeper) now that might make sense.
Unfortunately, the twitter guys seem to have halted development of twitter altogether (you can’t even search your own timeline, how bad is that). It’s rather odd that they haven’t been overtaken by a rival service yet.
David’s got the best idea!
Yep: http://twitter....atus/1955942726
“Twitter trends have become a pool of shit in the past 60 days. I used to check it hourly as it was valuable. Sigh.”
I think you can still find value in Twitter, it just depends on how you are using it, and who you are interacting with.
trending topics is one of the best features, and I do hope twitter will prevent the ‘chain letters’ phenomenon from taking over.
Spot on post Robin! This confirms my suspicion that re-tweets are just a modern form of the chain mail letter and it bubbles up in the trending topics…
Honestly, it’s just a shift in audience. It would appear Twitter’s audience and userbase has accelerated to Myspace kids and soccer moms way too early.
Other services like Facebook were able to adapt to the oncoming “mainstream” crowds while Twitter which is still an “early adopter” service wasn’t prepared for the spam, trending topic hacking or influx in pretty much everything that came in the past 2 months.
It’s sad. I love Twitter because it’s just as valuable as who you follow (i understand that) but ever since they acquired summize, that “who you follow” value become only 50% of what Twitter is to me and search / trending topics became the other 50% of what I loved about Twitter.
These days, that 50% is lacking but I don’t think it’s too late and I just hope Twitter can combat the problem soon.
The beauty of UGC (User Generated Content) is that the community does the grunt work for you if you provide the platform. The downfall is that your site is sculpted by the demographic that uses your service. This is exactly why a large number of TechCrunch readers are always calling “the death of myspace” not because Myspace sucks but because we’re not their target demographic anymore.
Twitter is slowly becoming irrelevant to the early adopter bay area startup crowd and that’s not a bad thing and it may lead to a quicker profit and public offering than many of us anticipated and they’re juggling right now. There’s the value of being beloved by the TechCrunch community or being beloved by the 6 billion other humans on Earth.
I’m sure they’ll make the most profitable choice in the long run despite how much we bitch and moan.
The shift in audience is most definitely noticeable when you look at the evolution of the trending topics list, good point.
To some degree and I don’t want to give the impression that I’ve given up on Twitter but I think the only value Twitter has to us now is if you are an investor…..
Sorry thought that would be a funny joke.
Investors don’t like mobs either. Just ask Metacafe how well it’s done trying to sell its 35 million users to anyone.
Is “Trending Topics” based on tweets or queries? If we posted a single tweet with a random hashtag and had the TWiT Army search for it, would it trend? Should it trend?
I agree with your post except for….
“Twitter is slowly becoming irrelevant to the early adopter bay area startup crowd”
Sorry but that’s just pure bullshit. Maybe some freatures like the trends aren’t as useful as they used to be (which I totally agree with), but that’s a far stretch from it being “irrelevant” to the early adopters. They’re still using it like a mother fucker.
well i haven’t effed any mothers lately so I don’t think I could relate.
Great article and I totally agree with the feature you propose, at least let us be able to filter out the noise also in trending topics.
What made you think it would be different from (say) 4chan? you can’t rely on the crowd to give to you reliable information … it’s been like that for centuries; there is no “collective intelligence”, but “collective stupidity”. the crowd killed jesus.
it might seem like a good trending list at first, because it was limited to the geek community at first. now you can’t have that after hollywood jumped in
Amen. The crowd gave us George W. Bush twice. The crowd thinks “Two and a Half Men” is one of the best shows on TV. The crowd has made Wal-Mart the most powerful retailer in world history.
heh, great points
The crowd also chose Twitter which requires an army of websites to provide functionality its competitors did have, but the crowd didn’t choose. That should have been the first sign of trouble. They chose no features, no groups, no channels (which might have helped with the trending issues now arising), no easy way to include files or links but that’s crowd intellect for you. How was Twitter a better than Pownce or Rejaw. Number of signups seems to be the dictate of relevance in the blogosphere and it just isn’t so. There was even a ridiculous post over on Mashable as to whether Twitter could replace Google solely because Twitter is closer to being realtime than Google, oh and TRENDING. This kind of mindless cheerleading hurts the market and hurts the end user community. Twitter is just starting to look more and more like the fad it probably is. I am not saying it isn’t useful, it is. The concept is anyway.
Customisation of trending topics would be nice, but for the average end user this would seem a very vague extension of the service. I don’t even know how it would work given the rapidity at which new topics and trends emerge.
Thats right.
“It would appear Twitter’s audience and userbase has accelerated to Myspace kids and soccer moms way too early.”
You’re misunderstanding the nature of the trending topics taking hold. Most of those in the top 10 are *ironic* – which shows the strong influence of media savvy, British culture on Twitter. The kids and soccer moms join in ineptly once a topic has taken off though – true.
Secondly, TechCrunch could have looked at the exact same stats and written a positive story about how users are taking the basics of Twitter and using it to create their own real time threads… The Jonas Webcast and Britain’s Got Talent are prominent in the list.
One way that trending topics could be “purified” though… filter out the hash tag.
Good observation!
Looks like there is more to scaling than just technology. Keeping the servers up was the first challenge. Keeping the conversation interesting will be the second?
I’m sorry I seem to disagree with most of the comments. I am FOR exactly what does appear in trending topics. I like that mindless wordplay games are trending topics when there actually isn’t news. Trending topics is what people are saying on twitter currently. It is what it is.
If you don’t like what’s trending you can easily make a difference. you know what to do.
I suggest that the uber twitter elite come off their pedestal from time to time to take part in what is actually happening on twitter, and not what they want to have happen on twitter.
the problem is that the ubergeeks promote “trending topics” as “most popular issues” … not the case, trending topics is what WE ALL are doing on twitter at the time… and it always changes.
3drunkwords, 3wordsaftersex, 3wordsduringsex, twitterfilms… all fun things to do that are here and now and current. Obviously when North Korea starts shooting off nuclear missiles, people won’t be playing the wordgames of twitter.
We are under no obligation to entertain you. This is not a news service. If that’s what you want, go back to RSS. Neither is God required to provide you with an epic story that will fill out your head lines. Where were you when the shuttle launched? #nasa was in the top 10 Prop 8, top 10. Give us a day off to chat about bad relationships. We are real people and under no obligation to spoon feed you the hottest news. PS creating the right group of followers will get you in the know faster than watching top 100 lists May be you just don’t get it. Also @BBCWorld @Wired @Mashable
Robin: use twitscoop like the rest of us and stop complaining
One thing you haven’t touched on, that I’ve noticed countless times recently is the way affiliate marketing and their ilk are latching on to trends purely to have their links found, a fact hugely exasperated by the obfuscated links.
i.e.
“10 ways to increase your income #bing bit.ly/abcde” (=somenaffsite.com/?id=affiliate347)
Similarly and just as disturbing is that some of these spammers are so aggressive in their campaigns that their messages become trends! When “Britney **** vids” is a “trend” enough is enough!
Well, I have to disagree with you Robin…
Take a look at the Daily Tweet – a new Twitter trends tool I created…
http://tweetzi.com/news
Didn’t techcrunch tell us a few days ago that Twitter was replacing RSS as the new standard for knowledge distribution? Bullshit then, bullshit now. Twitter is what is sounds like, a bunch of random people yammering at once. Fun and useful in ways, but not the “new way memes develop in our culture.”
http://www.tech...t-in-peace-rss/
“Didn’t techcrunch tell us a few days ago that Twitter was replacing RSS as the new standard for knowledge distribution?”
Like RSS you have to be subscribed to the right feeds. Otherwise, Twitter is nothing more than chatter – in the same way that, for some people, the web is nothing but funny YouTube videos and cartoonising your avatar.
Every time I close the trending topics sidebar it reopens at a later visit. Totally worthless and proves Twitter has gone mainstream… and young. How about trending topics JUST amongst my followers?
Twitter was never a good tool for filtering an "incoming" stream in the first place. Any "top 10" is doomed to fail as a filtering tool these days.
I was just thinking the exact same thing: that Twitter trending is no longer useful to me. The trending topics have gone from very informative to mildly entertaining. I specifically started using UberTwitter on my Blackberry because it offered “Trending Topics” and Twitterberry did not.
I liked starting my day by seeing what was going on in the world – the North Korean nuclear testing was a great example.
Now the trending is all about “three words for this”, “three words for that”, tv shows, etc. All this did was make me realize I’m not watching enough TV to be socially acceptable.
I guess I have several choices:
- stop using Twitter
- find out more about this Twittercop that Pete suggested
- lighten up a little and have some fun.
Given the opinions of those on this one little comment it seems an opportunity exists for someone to develop a useful Twitter add-on or filtering system.
Thanks for broaching the subject. I thought I was just being cranky today – but I see that it’s on the minds of others too.
You could start your day by going to a real news site, like, oh, the New York Times. Oh, sorry, that’s such a radical crazy old-school thought, and it just frightens the geeknorati.
BBC’s front page is a good place to go for that.
Waiting for a tool that figures out who are the Myspace kids and soccer moms, and then batch-put them on a blacklist.
The masses have spoken!
Twitter – fundamentally, not too much more than an opt-in I.M. distribution mechanism.
Talking Twitter, do you know that we are almost to the 2 billionth tweet ?
http://www.tweespeed.com gives an instant speed and try to estimate the reaching date.
2 Billion ! Impressive !
Hashtag spam has arrived – Enjoy! :/
I love the idea of filtering the trends. If you could remove trends that aren’t important to you, the next biggest trend could take its place.
The issue is that we care more about ourselves than what the media feeds us. This what mommy told us will trend until there is something that we all care about more. Anyways it’s just a tiny segment of the population on Twitter the part that spends too much time online.
You know, I see this happening more and more. We all think twitter is this amazing… thing… we’re waiting for it to actually have members (it is nowhere NEAR as big as marketers say it is…). The more “I’m brushing my teeth” “now I am pooping” people get on there, the less useful it will become. Don’t get me wrong, it can go so many ways… but right now, it looks like it is going to go the way of myspace. Remember when that was a great place to network? Now it is nothing more than a trick-fest for the sick generation we live among.
I hope this is not the case, I wrote TweetBoss @ http://www.tweetboss.com to mash up twitter trends with news to give you a real-time look into the news based on what is trending in twitter. I hope the trends have not lost their value.
PageRank and RetwittRank are equally shitty criteria.
No, that’s not true, RetwillRank is literally shittier, because it’s ‘near real-time’ and it CAN NOT be policed in the slightest.
The moment a new criterium for the SEARCH appears it is being abused by EVERYBODY. Notice that the very motivation to join twitter is: to attract attention; miserable and dull, stupid, aggressive, you name it, people JOIN in order to abuse the mechanism and for no other reason.
You wanted a ’social media’? You got it… along with the idiocy of your ’socium’, sorry, they come as a bundle.
This is America. Did you really expect its pulse, as reflected in by Twitter’s trending topics, to diverge greatly from American Idol, The Jonas Brothers or sex?
No news is good news?
Those are the trends because there isn’t much real news right now. (Of course, there’s news, but none with the popular attraction we expect Twits to RT.)
Shameless plug: http://feeds2.f...rTrendingTopics has the latest Trending Topics with easy links to Google News, What the Trend, Google Trends and Wolphram|Alpha.
Search the web your way.
http://www.republics.us
jesus.
We need clippy in here.
“It looks like you’re trying to build a meta-search engine.”
We’re disappointed Twitter isn’t generating quality news? Haha. Bathroom walls used to be so reliable. Let’s go back to that.
ROFL
That was a good one. Twitter is the successor of bathroom walls… let’s add images and the graffity crowd (gang-related) will “be on Twitter” too.
Thank you for the good laugh.
twitpic.com
Crowd sourced trends do not work. You need filters or something semantic to make any sense.
Check out http://www.Tinker.com or some of the topical trends that show Twitter trends with the noise and spam filtered out:
http://tinker.c...y=TV&event=
Classic. This was so obvious it could’ve been an Onion headline.
Breaking News: Mob Fails to Think Clearly!
I have to agree-I first thought people were thinking that they were funny or something, but now this has become out of control and really sad.
Twitter should really have a ranking system where the system determines whether a tweeter should be added into the Trending topics count.
For example-Amount of followers/following ratio, updates, how long has the account been created, how many times has the user said that, how many times the trending topic within one tweet, …
That’s how I think Twitter should be run.
In other words, you want Ashton Kutcher to tell you what’s important in the world. It’s all about trucker caps, baby!
And this one was good too. Ashton at least can ask his Mom for the advice, other’s don’t have anybody with a brain around.
His Mom, you mean Demi?
We have our own realtime search engine so I turned it onto Twitter – turns out (according to our system anyway) that these “trending” topics are not the same as the biggest ones on Twitter at the moment, so it depends very much on how you focus it.
Short blog post on this here:
http://broadstu...oo-closely.html
I recently blogged on the how users are spamming Twitter Trending topics by using hashtags, including screenshots and examples of offenders.
http://www.twit...-and-abuse.html
You guys have seen this, right?
http://www.google.com/alerts
You don’t understand, FBU, it doesn’t have a “real-time” term IN THE ARTICLES written about it on TechCrunch.
All your Twitter are belong to us.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. You know, there’s already a service that tells you what’s happening in the world that uses highly educated professionals to filter out the dross and pap of mass chatter. It’s called a newspaper. Sure, it takes a newspaper a little longer to communicate than Twitter, but it takes a little longer to make a real meal than a burger and fries. Newspapers are getting better at this “gotta have it right now or I’m gonna explode with impatience” thing, while still providing grounded summations of important events. Perfect? Not by a stretch — newspapers are still run by humans and (worse) corporations. But they’re far better than the mob. TechCrunch’s naive adoration of — make that LUST for — all things Twitter is becoming more laughable by the day. What will you do when Twitter inevitably follows in the path of AOL and MySpace? You haven’t even seen what will happen to Twitter once the spammers figure it out.
Newspaper? This is a joke, right?
No, you can get quality news fast. Most TV news outlets have decent reporting on their websites. Even Fox News tends to have decent articles on its website.
I usually go to the BBC’s or CNN’s since their online coverage tends to be more comprehensive than others. MSNBC’s site goes deeper into political stories than most others.
The implication was newspaper websites. I should have been clearer about that.
I cant believe they let you write this crap. Maybe those memes are pointing to the fact that there are no “?hot topics” and people are just having fun. Ya its to bad you cant just look at the trending topics and find some fodder for a news story! your such a d-bag
Twitter was been myspace-itized. Sad day.
Contrary to what you said, it’s a wonderful day.
One more example of the fact that SV crowd of people, including those of them who prowdly call themself ‘investors’, ‘venture capitalists’ and all such names are just OUT OF TOUCH with reality. Like COMPLETELY.