Twitter’s Trending Topics is one of the reasons that Twitter has become so successful. Revealing the public consensus to the simple question of “what are you doing?” is one of the most enjoyable parts of being a part of Twitter. When my favorite band, my favorite baseball team, or my favorite coffee company show up on the list, it’s really exciting. I’ll spend some time reading everybody’s responses for a little while, and perhaps even add my own commentary. It turns into a global discussion on a single topic. Once a word, phrase, or hashtag shows up there, it only catapults it to more discussion.
Like all good things in life, if they’re accessible enough, it’ll be taken over by people that aren’t necessarily looking to do good or have a thoughtful discussion. At it’s best, the stupid hashtags show up, such as #threewordsaftersex or #musicmonday, at it’s worst, spammers leech onto existing hashtags and just use it to get into people’s search, w/out being relevant to the discussion. Long term, this is the equivalent of MySpace’s irritating ads. Untargeted and distracting. As this becomes more frequent or targeted, this could be a reason that Twitter loses relevance.
Twitter has a big opportunity to turn Trending Topics into Trending Topics based on user criteria. The useful areas for me are in the following areas:
- Follower list: What are my friends talking about? How about their friends that I don’t know (friends, plus once removed)?
- Location: What are people in Seattle, WA (my hometown) talking about?
- Interests: What are trumpet players (my instrument) talking about? How about other motorcyclists? Or others that work in Social Media?
I like to think that my beer drinking friends are smarter than your beer drinking friends. With this, you could have 3 or so different lists of trending topics. All of which could be opt-in if you decide. However, I don’t work for Twitter Inc, so it’s not my job to say how they should do this. Regardless, the need for a middle layer of relevance between Facebook/Twitter status updates and the greater world’s Trending Topics exists.
This could get really interesting. Twitter biggest strength right now is the collection of data detailing what people are thinking about right now. If they want to become the central place for global consciousness, it’s going to need to become more granular.
I like the first two – I can see those features being really useful – but the third would probably require a large expansion of the twitter site to make it more facebook-like (i.e. interests, etc) – which it doesn’t seem that twitter is too interested in.
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