Mending Trending Topics

Image by Salon de Maria via Flickr

Once upon a time a popular startup provided the ability to find out what's hot online through trending topics which was a great feature. I wrote previously that as Twitter has pushed through into the mainstream the top trending topics has lost a lot of it's value and credibility. This is because users have learnt how to game the system and so have spammers!

Twitter has a significant amount of pocket money so it's great that they are addressing this issue. Acknowledging that Trends began as a useful way to find out what’s going on but has grown less interesting due to the noisiness of the conversation. Twitter spokesperson Jenna Sampson announced the following through a blog post:

So, today we're starting to experiment with improvements to trends that will help you find more relevant tweets. Specifically, we're working to show higher quality results for trend queries by returning tweets that are more useful. The improvement won't be very noticeable at first, but this is a small step toward unearthing more value in search and getting you more relevant results.

The trending topics were a starting destination for my Internet activity once but they're not what they used to be. Hopefully this will lead to better results and with details emerging around trends for cities, the feature should become infinitely more valuable!

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