Twitter Trending Terms – Could Do Better

Twitter has oodles of data – millions of tweets a day. They have smart people working on this data, and they make all the right noises about social search. However, I’m looking at the trending topics on the site just now and I see these: MJ’s, Rip MJ, RIP Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, #iranelection, Pop, Thriller, MTV, Iran, #michaeljackson.

I don’t get it. There are a number of problems here:

1. These aren’t topics, they are words or phrases. There are only 4 topics present here (Michael Jackson’s death, Farrah Fawcett’s death, the Iranian Election and MTV).
2. The ‘phrases’ present in the terms are pretty lame: ‘MJ’s’? Earlier today the phrase ‘Did Michael Jackson’ was a trending topic.
3. There is no attempt at normalization (RIP MJ == RIP Michael Jackson)
4. They actually are not at all interesting – anyone out there not know about Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett or Iran? Perhaps the MTV thing is a little more obscure.
5. They aren’t trending – ok, the RIP stories are, but the Iranian election? that’s been top of mind for many days now.

Twitter’s featuring of these topics and the immaturity of the technology in spite of the promise of the data does not paint a good picture for their prospects.

Comments

[Jan Berkel]

I completely agree. It's not too hard to improve the results by using the frequency of a trend to filter out noise. #iranelection is trending almost every day, which makes it completely uninteresting, but it was interesting when it trended for the first time. Then there are trends like Spain or Brazil which trend regularly (but not daily), usually when a football match is on, which might be of interest.

I think the most interesting trends are the ones which have never trended before (= "breaking news" on twitter).

It also shouldn't be too hard to determine that all the RIP, MJ, Michael Jackson trends are basically the same by using some statistical analysis on the content.

[Brenton]

Also, once a topic has been on the "trending" list for more than an hour or so, the signal-to-noise ratio in the search results for it plummets as people tweet things like:

1. "Huh? What is #[topic name]? Why is it trending?"

2. "#[topic 1] #[topic 2] #[topic 3] please follow me follow me!"

3. "We did it, guys! #[topic] is now a trending topic!!!!!!"

A lot of this could be solved by having the trending topics on a separate page.

[Brenton]

My above point made better with a graphic: http://www.vizworld.com/2009/05/twitter-trending-topics-graph/

[Mark Roddy]

I totally agree with the sentiment that they're doing poorly in distinguishing between topics and phrases. The same thing happened when the Iran election started trending (multiple 'topics' on iran all refering to the same thing).