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Who should be the judge of relevant conversation?
Why should the voice of the masses be ignored for the voice of the few?
That said, I think Twitter is going to focus more on blocking spammers from piggybacking on trending topics than changing the topics themselves. "Improvement to trends...more relevant tweets" sounds like fitting the tweets better to the trends, not fitting the trends to something.
Fail to see the logic there, but nice fumble (to use an analogy that fits in with the Packers, Giants and Bucs ... so is germane to the trending topics today).
Your post sort of assumes there is intelligent life out there and it all lives on twitter, or will one day. I think, and this is just me, we have to remember what regular people talk about. Of course we also have to take into consideration the sorts of people who mostly talk on the web in social networks. A lot of what we all see in trending topics is who won the oscar, what artist won the grammy, which phone rocks, what the price of a netbook is and so on.
None of this takes away from the deeper conversation that also takes place, but it is general conversation. More people are aware when it's oscar time. More people are aware of new gadgets that come out. The important conversation is more subjective. It doesn't stream the same way - it's flow is interrupted by the massive amount of social influence. An example of this would be what was just a headline on the LA Times. Was it about homelessness? Nope. The current state of the world economy? No again. Was it about healthcare reform? Absolutely not. It was about banning the practice of de-clawing cats. Headlines aren't about important things. headlines are about what sells papers or gets attention.
Perhaps trending topics would be more relevant if it were created from your connections but it would make the twitter community a little more insular. I thought social media was supposed to be about expanding your community.
Miiko brings up a great point. I think that trending topics qualified by lists would be much more interesting.
'Twitter may seem to some to be dominated by bien pensant, liberal spirits at the moment. Will I be so optimistic about it when these spirits are matched by forces of religiosity and nationalism that might not accord with my chattering-class, liberal elite preferences? When the political machines march in and start recruiting and acquiring millions of followers, giving them the power to close sites with DDOS slashdotting campaigns, what will I say then?'
Considering the average Twitter user follows 7 people and tweets, literally, what they are doing; are they immature or are you defining them based on some pseudo-advanced culture you've progressed to?
"While Lists help to some extent, we can only benefit from a layer of intelligent filtering integrated into our stream to further personalize and improve the experience – not unlike what FeedHub and AideRSS attempted to do for RSS feeds."
but also with hashtag spam by many ignorant and lewd individuals.
I was yet stunned by the number of people who have no reticence to publicly
post filth with their name on it.
The problem has become exponentially worse (literally),
since the mass arrival of MySpace users in recent weeks and months.
As soon as you go "ooh, people are talking about X. That's interesting." X changes to Y and is gone. T
The last real significant trending topic was the Iran situation.
Best,
Rich