Twitter’s Trending Topics area is one of the easiest things to game on the web. Even when trends start out as real items, spammers often latch onto them with bogus tweets hoping to ride the wave and get some people seeing their spammy nonsense. Today, Twitter is acknowledging this.
In a post on its blog, Twitter notes that the “noisiness of the conversation” has led Trends to be less interesting. So beginning today they’re going to be experimenting with ways to surface more relevant tweets in this area. While they don’t come out and say it, the implication here seems pretty clear: They’ll be in some way curating the topics and the tweets. It’s not clear if this will be algorithmic or manual yet.
Actually, Twitter has kind of been doing this with topics for a while. When a spammy topic gets into Trends, Twitter quite often will remove it. But this sentence, “Specifically, we’re working to show higher quality results for trend queries by returning tweets that are more useful,” seems to suggest that it will be curating tweets within trending topics as well. And th