Why "trending topics" are so spectacularly useless | Hacker News Reader

Why "trending topics" are so spectacularly useless

collisiondetection.net

20 pointssdfx9 comments

It would be more interesting if Twitter showed local trends, such as the trends in Tweets by people in my city, or in my neighborhood, or even on my block.

I believe that they are planning on implementing this in the near future. With geolocation support rolled out they have the ability to capture that information.

Not everybody uses geotagging, so you will be better off creating a list of people you want to provide the trends and then use a tool to extract that info.

Spectacularly useless may be an overstatement. Even if the twitter topics reflect the mass-media-consensus at the current time, they could still serve as an indicator of a topic being repressed in the media while spreading through new media.

Yeah, Twitter often picks up on stories a lot earlier than media grabs a hold of them also.

I don't see this; barring rarities, I see people posting links to stories already in the news media.

AFAICT, things just become popular on Twitter slightly before they're talk show fodder.

If they made them secret or hard to get to they'd be more interesting. As it is there's a positive feedback loop with public trending topics.

Once a service crosses a certain threshold they stop being cool and start reflecting the masses. Look at YouTube now, its MTV + America's funniest home videos (minus Bob Saget).

Facebook mainly beat this by being a very walled garden. Oh-so-open twitter can't do that. And for the record FlockingMe didn't seem any more relevant than the masses just my friend's drivel.

I agree that trending topics is no longer "trending" simply because Twitter has become "mainstream" more or less. Remember when Facebook wasn't mainstream? Now it's a spammer's dream.

So goes any well guarded secret that gets let out. It's inevitable.

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