Better Twitter Trending Topics
As Twitter evolves, and more people share what’s happening in their own world, we want to provide another way for people to discover topics that may be relevant to them. Last week we began to slowly roll out a new feature called Local Trends to expose what people are talking about on the state and city level, and today we’ve fully launched so everyone can use it.
Trending topics have always been annoying to me.
I’m too far outside of the mainstream to appreciate the topics the majority of my fellow twitter users tweet about.
I enabled the Chicago local trends, but didn’t notice any real difference in topic selection.
Instead of scoring topics based on all tweets or by geography, I wish twitter would instead leverage my follower network. A few ideas:
Trending topics based on the folks I follow. When I don’t check twitter for a few days, a list of trending topics based on the people I directly follow would be handy to get back up to speed.
However, most of the time I’m fairly current on my twitter feed, so this would be redundant most of the time.
Trending topics based on the folks I follow, that they follow. The same as above, one level deeper. If I follow
[a, b, c], the trending topics would based on[[a.a, a.b, a.c],[b.a, b.b, b.c],[c.a, c.b, c.c]].The idea is to leverage the people I find interesting (that I follow directly) to scrounge up interesting topics that wouldn’t necessarily otherwise appear on my radar. Hopefully this would also lead to less timeline redundancy than idea 1.
Victoria came up with this idea, and it took me a while to realize its ramifications. I’m still not sure if I’ve thought it completely through.
Trending topics based the folks that follow me. Idea 1 would lead to timeline redundancy while idea 2 is more complicated to think about and explain (and perhaps implement).
Perhaps the ideal data source is the folks who follow me.
I also follow most of the folks that follow me, so there’s a bit of relevancy reinforcement there, though far weaker than idea 1.
Theoretically there’s a loss of control if the data source for my trending topics stems from people I don’t select myself, but practically who’s going to subscribe to my tweet drivel if we don’t have at least a little bit in common?
Spot on ! I’ve found those trending topics to be completely useless so-far. The improvements brought up here would make them somewhat useable.
