The story from Mashable is that Twitter will 'Show Popular Tweets On Top of search results' and they are quite excited about it: "We think the new feature is an important evolution of the Twitter
search experience and one we’re looking forward to seeing in action." I think it's a stupid and unhelpful idea. If Twitter is anything, then it's real time data and search. The emphasis is on getting information out quickly, being able to share it and quite frankly I enjoy the egalitarian nature of it. My tweets are no more important than yours and vice versa. Twitter disagrees though, hence the popularity aspect.
There aren't that many ways of working out 'popularity'. By number of followers is an obvious. Given that some actor chappie that I've never heard of has 4.5 million followers I guess he's going to be pretty popular. If he decides to comment on the latest news story, do I want to read what he says? Probably not, and I certainly don't want Twitter to pop his stuff to the top simply because he's got a large following.
Another approach is via RT - retweeting. This is a better idea, but again is based on followers. If the actor says something and it gets RT a lot, again I don't think that actually means a great deal. There's already a huge amount of egotism in Twitter based on followers, and I think it's detrimental to the service. This leads to an interesting question - if I tweet something, and then someone famous retweets it, and then her followers retweet again and again, does that make her more 'popular' than the actual originator of the information?
A third approach is a twist on the follower thing - the more someone is followed, and the less they follow back. Can't see this working well either, since everyone will be going through their account deleting people they follow like crazy, until they work out that the people they dropped then drop them back.
If Twitter want to make this work, they need to add in another step I think. Which is to say that I should be able to arrange results based on the people who I follow. If I'm searching for information I'm going to be much more interested in the people who I follow, and I'd find it interesting to see what 'popular' people are saying. This still doesn't help if I'm looking for information in totally different areas though, so it's going to be of limited value.
Twitter - your strength isn't search, really. It's amassing huge amounts of data very quickly and throwing it back out to people who are interested. The users decide who is popular, based on their own opinions, and that's as it should be. Don't start telling me what I should be thinking, or who I should be listening to - I can do that myself thanks very much. If you're going to spend programming time doing anything, spend it on setting up good strong filtering systems so I can tune into or out of the conversations of the people that I follow, and while you're at it, introduce a good conversation threader. Leave search up to the people who want to search and who are good at it.
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There aren't that many ways of working out 'popularity'. By number of followers is an obvious. Given that some actor chappie that I've never heard of has 4.5 million followers I guess he's going to be pretty popular. If he decides to comment on the latest news story, do I want to read what he says? Probably not, and I certainly don't want Twitter to pop his stuff to the top simply because he's got a large following.
Another approach is via RT - retweeting. This is a better idea, but again is based on followers. If the actor says something and it gets RT a lot, again I don't think that actually means a great deal. There's already a huge amount of egotism in Twitter based on followers, and I think it's detrimental to the service. This leads to an interesting question - if I tweet something, and then someone famous retweets it, and then her followers retweet again and again, does that make her more 'popular' than the actual originator of the information?
A third approach is a twist on the follower thing - the more someone is followed, and the less they follow back. Can't see this working well either, since everyone will be going through their account deleting people they follow like crazy, until they work out that the people they dropped then drop them back.
If Twitter want to make this work, they need to add in another step I think. Which is to say that I should be able to arrange results based on the people who I follow. If I'm searching for information I'm going to be much more interested in the people who I follow, and I'd find it interesting to see what 'popular' people are saying. This still doesn't help if I'm looking for information in totally different areas though, so it's going to be of limited value.
Twitter - your strength isn't search, really. It's amassing huge amounts of data very quickly and throwing it back out to people who are interested. The users decide who is popular, based on their own opinions, and that's as it should be. Don't start telling me what I should be thinking, or who I should be listening to - I can do that myself thanks very much. If you're going to spend programming time doing anything, spend it on setting up good strong filtering systems so I can tune into or out of the conversations of the people that I follow, and while you're at it, introduce a good conversation threader. Leave search up to the people who want to search and who are good at it.
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