Twitter’s Trending Topics area is one of the easiest things to game on the web. Even when trends start out as real items, spammers often latch onto them with bogus tweets hoping to ride the wave and get some people seeing their spammy nonsense. Today, Twitter is acknowledging this.
In a post on its blog, Twitter notes that the “noisiness of the conversation” has led Trends to be less interesting. So beginning today they’re going to be experimenting with ways to surface more relevant tweets in this area. While they don’t come out and say it, the implication here seems pretty clear: They’ll be in some way curating the topics and the tweets. It’s not clear if this will be algorithmic or manual yet.
Actually, Twitter has kind of been doing this with topics for a while. When a spammy topic gets into Trends, Twitter quite often will remove it. But this sentence, “Specifically, we’re working to show higher quality results for trend queries by returning tweets that are more useful,” seems to suggest that it will be curating tweets within trending topics as well. And that it may even in some way rank tweets to show more relevant ones for the topic at hand.
Twitter notes that users may not notice the improvements at first, but soon they will. Their wording is also interesting in that they note that this is about “unearthing more value in search.” Again, that would seem to suggest that Twitter is thinking about the bigger picture of how to rank tweets based on relevancy (not just in Trending Topics). That could be by user authority, which has been a sticky issue in the past.
Hmmm, so how do you determine what is more relevant with a trending topic such as #oneletteroffmovies??
Joking aside, I’m curious to see how this unfolds. It will be great to see tweets on trending topics that actually had information to the topic and aren’t just tweets like “Why is #Kanye trending?”
So how should they handle the situation in the screenshot where you see “Fort Hood”, #FortHood and #FtHood? Should that be one topic or three?
good question, I would combine them all as one and note that above the search results.
When will Twitter make money? If the current trend keeps going on, Twitter is doomed.
Enough already!
I hope they don’t hold out till it is not cool anymore. Kind of like digg. Then the founders will regret not cashing out.
When you see trends of Movies, iPhone, Apple and other companies, doesn’t that look to you like twitter is making money off of those “trends”.
There’s probably close to a thousand relevant trends going on every day, however those remain, just pay attention.
You don’t really need to see how the money is going in. Just on stats, or faster access to their stream they can charge a lot of money, and they already signed deals with Bing and Google.
Wake up
Hopefully their retweet system will play a part in this. They could have a trend based upon retweets, so if there are 1,000 techcrunch retweets in an hour they can safely say that subject is “popular” and could be worth adding.
I do hate the spammy nature of trending topics now, it really does detract from the “experience”. Six pages of “FREE FAMILY GUY MOVIE HERE CLICK!!!” sucks balls.
They’ve been trying to add more value to the trending topics over the past couple weeks (?) by adding text at the top of the list. It’s usually a paragraph that explains what the topic is about. For instance, I just clicked “Vampire Diaries” on the trending topics list and at the top is “A TV show about teen vampires which often trends when fans are tweeting about the latest episode.”
They’re basically answering the question “Why is this a trending topic?”
I hate it when the same thing is trending like 4 times. Google Wave, #googlewave, #gwave. I’d like to see less spam of course. I mean, c’mon, this is so annoying: “PLEASE FOLLOW ME! A-Rod #Yankees Matsui KEEP THE WAVE GOing” Came across that one last night [about 9 times]
Retweets and the new lists were both designed for this purpose. That’s all I have to say.
Oh, and MG, they already handle multiple similar words and merge them into a single topic.
Use the json search API to list the current trending topics for proof. It shows the actual search query used for each of the trending topics.
quick fix: don’t include messages with multiple trending topics
How Does Twitter Spam Happen? http://bit.ly/OuIcu
I guess that when you are looking for what people are talking about, then you are going to bump into spam because, well, you don’t know what you are looking for! Twitter trends are full of RTs, so the rest should be spam…
I don’t understand why theres not more of a backlash about this – isn’t this almost a net neutrality type issue? I know we are not talking about data, but why is it okay for them to control content?
I think the better solution to the problem is to make a completely separate section thats called something like “featured topics” – at the least that would be a more accurate name for it.
Maybe I don’t full understand Net Neutrality and where you’re coming from, but how is this any different than what search engines do with search results?
You’re blog may have the most keywords, headlines, images and anchors related to Startups, but that doesn’t mean you won’t be overshadowed by better blogs whose content is decidedly more relevant.
If I understand what Twitter is doing, they’re not silencing or removing Tweets from the service itself, they’re just focusing on more relevant Tweets where you’re looking for trending topics. I don’t see anything wrong with that.
How does “curating” differ from “moderating”? Anyway, always better to weed out the spammers than trying to weed out the spam.
I wonder how twitter will rank a tweet? We know about SER but how will it rate a useful tweet link than the useless or spammy ones. Instead of curating the trending topics twitter should decide what tweets should be displayed on the trending topics page.
Hopefully they also lower the rank to stupid trending topics… like #whenimdrunk #mymomsaid #ShesCuteBut.. aand soo on an so fort for ever an ever… i just think they should be more constructive… or am i the only one to think that way..
Maybe they should have a way for people to vote up or down those trends.
That is an interesting idea. I like it.
The documents that TC release regarding Twitter’s future plans showed a description/screenshots for an admin tool they use already to curate those topics.
Geolocation would also help. A lot. Or at least language.
4 Steps to Get Rid of Twitter Spam
Yup, just 4!
If everybody did this right now, the Twitterverse would be a better place:
http://bit.ly/1LWjGa
It’s about time. Twitter only has a bazillion users and sometimes half as many seem like spammers