I agree with you as it relates to Spammers and idiot abusers of actual Trending Topics. TTs can be so interesting and useful! Half the time I hear about up-to-the-minute news by reading it on Twitter before I hear it somewhere else! I've also learned about a lot of topics via TTs. I personally believe in allowing the natural trending topics like "Good Night" or "Happy Father's Day" ... it always reminds me of the humanity of everyone using Twitter, the natural cycle of real lives. I like those too! Just one person's opinion.
Janine
· 5 months ago
I HAVE AN IDEA! If it could be done, it would help everyone on a personalized basis without Twitter having to get into as much censorship (aside from Spam) ... Allow each person to be able to click "OFF" a certain Trending Topic, alllowing the next one to appear, essentially then looking at #11 or 12 etc. and disabling the effectiveness of the STUPID ONES in the top 10. Would that work???
Bastian Lehmann
· 5 months ago
Stan,
great article. You might wanna check out Zensify for the iPhone. We try to solve this exact problem by offering our users trending topics based on what their friends are doing right now, which brings a lot more relevance to trending topics.
We just released a new verison of Zensify yesterday and the details should be in your inbox.
Bastian
Disclaimer: I'm from Zensify
Patrick
· 5 months ago
I like this idea a lot, will check it out, is there a desktop version?
Larry M
· 5 months ago
I'm working on a site Tweetlnks.com that does "personal" trending on your twitter feed. It's in early beta, so it's open for suggestions. Crowd-sourced development is the model
This is how I think Trending Topics should really work. I don't care about most of the Trending Topics, but I would like to know what's trending in the people I follow. This would be especially useful for some accounts that I'm running that report on trending topics for certain interest groups (see http://www.twitter.com/RightTopics for an example). [I made a comment about this yesterday, but it didn't post. Looks like the Facebook Connect login doesn't work.]
Gary Arndt
· 5 months ago
The problem is the #1 priority for Twitter right now is growth, or rather, the perception of growth. Spammers and other empty sites are one of the primary vehicles of that growth. If they got rid of the spammers, then their growth numbers would decrease and people wouldn't think that Twitter is a big deal anymore.
Right now, I think Twitter would rather suffer the spam than lose any perception of slowing growth.
Ben Goulding
· 5 months ago
That's a good point Gary, but do you think the hype would really die off? I personally don't believe it would.
Gary Arndt
· 5 months ago
Most of the hype is because of numbers. Ashton Kutcher wouldn't have had 1m followers if tons of zombie Twitter accounts hadn't added him from the suggested friends list.
Melissa Fine
· 5 months ago
I don't think the hype would die off. People have short attention spans & loads of choices. If that spam continues, the "good" Twitter fans WILL go elsewhere... and bad word of mouth will kill Twitter faster than anything. On the other hand, if Twitter takes a commanding lead AGAINST these relentless spammers, I think there would be a true swell of positive word of mouth from quality users, and the numbers would just go up!
rodney rumford
· 5 months ago
Nice post Stan, Twitter will figure out how to filter out the spammers that ride the coattails of valid trending topics incessantly. What these people don't realize is that their behavior is only marginally effective at best. It does add noise. Twitter might simply add a report spam button that would pull those tweets out of the trending hashtag stream via an automated algorithm.
mundane trending topics light goodnight will eventually not be in trending topics as they might eventually become blacklisted trending topics very easily with an editorial control on twitters end. "Gaming" trending topics will come to an end soon enough. Twitter is focused on keeping the wheels on the bus.
What is relevant is a bit of an editorial call and at this point twitter does not seem to be overly concerned as a lot of these trending topics fall off the list quickly enough.
Thanks for sharing your thoughs
cheers!
Melissa Fine
· 5 months ago
I really like the idea of an automatic "report spam button" you can hit. While I felt strongly enough about it to go through the process of figuring out how to report (or comment on) those "g" girls, I'd love to be able to just hit a button. Or could their be some way to hit a button that would block reception of repeated spammers on any given topics? I guess that's more complicated, but if I could have just blocked the reception (and send them a notice that I did so) of all those g+number spams from the feed, I would have enjoyed the topic. Enough people do that & maybe so-called marketers would get the hint!
Rich_Weaver
· 5 months ago
Just the beginning of gaming trending topics I am afraid.
Rich_Weaver
· 5 months ago
CleanTweets does a good job of killing off some spammers!
iTbay
· 5 months ago
Once accounts, if they do become verified in the future will be able to fix the spam problem & this problem we have with trending topics with spammers - there's tons of #gorillapenises in this world who have nothing better to do but spam.
When it comes to something like goodnight, it's part of the human side of twitter cuz as the night goes on this topic rises, however, I can understand it's irrelevance.
Bottom line: twitter needs to make some money so It can develop it's system better, like fixing the trending topics issue. These issues r causing the community to lose trust in the system. Trust needs to be restored & aligned with twitters usefulness & media buzz. Twitter needs to start making some money so it can fix these problems & grow.
Twitterislame
· 5 months ago
Aw, c'mon guys. Innovate your way out of it! Have a conversation. Engage!
FireMom
· 5 months ago
I actually clicked on the Pirates trend yesterday thinking, "OH! Are the (Pittsburgh) Pirates DOING something?!" No. No they weren't.
adamsonx
· 5 months ago
Twitter bans a couple of words. We already know they ban any word that deals with illegal contraband, and they ban the word 'douche' from being in the trending topics because of the #gokeyisadouche thing. I'm guessing that they ban all curse words or 'dirty words'.
seanmacdhai
· 5 months ago
nice article.. yes, this will ruin Twitter. What I don't understand is why the guys at Twitter simply do not limit the number of allowed tweets per hour, or per minute. Also, only allow so many follows per hour or per minute... Wouldn't that end spam instantly? And this would not affect the folks that actually *use* Twitter. I have actively used the site since day one, and I post 10-30 times per day, depending. A limit of, say 50, wouldn't affect me at all.
Wicke
· 5 months ago
Twitter should create a tool that should have trending topics for different category like technology, news, business , spam etc. And this is the solution for this issue
lodank
· 5 months ago
I agree... I wrote an article on the same issue a while back. I noticed it when rick astley was trending...
Interestingly, I manage to get by on Tweetdeck and Tweetie without ever caring what the trending topics are, mostly because I am far more interested in what people who have chosen to engage with me are saying. Frankly you can do more by trending against your connections vs. the entire scope of Twitter.
The issue came up last week regarding the Moonfruit hashtag promotion and the words "gaming" the system were used. Legitimate twitter users wanted in on their promotion. I don't expect the people who I follow to have a meaningful tweet every time. If you do, you are likely following the wrong people. It was irrelevant to me that moonfruit may have been a "trending" topic, it was far more relevant to me that some folks I follow suddenly had some funny tweets with what was at the time a bizarre hashtag to me. I'd rather find stuff that way than vs. a "trend", but that is just me.
Ryan Freed
· 5 months ago
I have been noticing this trend since I started using twitter. I have been very cautious in using twitter as a marketing tool, even though it can be helpful if used correctly. There are also many problems with people following you just because they want a follow back, not because they are actually interested in the information you have to share or what you have to say.
John
· 5 months ago
An answer to twitter spammers using trending topics: tidytweet.com @TidyTweet
entwipreneur
· 5 months ago
Very true. Thanks for the post.
Melissa Fine
· 5 months ago
Could not agree with you more! Last night, there was a really fun topic/game: #unacceptable. It was COMPLETELY RUINED by these "g" bots/girls/whatever. They all have @g and some number as their accounts (i.e.: @g688600 @g688538 @g688988 @g688914). The entire topic was BLITZED with "Download your favorite shows and watch them on your computer!" & "I make $3,000 on Twitter a day!" This is the 2nd time I've given up on an otherwise fun Trending Topic because of them. I reported them last night... but not sure if that really works. Hope it changes. As usual, a few opportunistic rotten apples ruin the entire bunch!!! Thx for this post! Hope others RT it and loads of people use their voices, report them, and BOOT THE BOTS!
Sergio
· 5 months ago
There is one solution to that problem; use http://www.twitterlive.net On that web site you can create twitter topics and live sessions that other people can easily find and follow.
swag
· 5 months ago
One man's spam is another man's marketing. Deal with it.
blake
· 5 months ago
Digg seems to have the found the way to deal with the phony mess that is out there...I'm sure that Twitter will soon get it!
MonsterBuzz
· 5 months ago
I love Twitter because I could find a lot of interesting topics over the Internet. Now it becomes a favorite place for spammers. Gosh =(
Jay Bienvenu
· 5 months ago
The Trending Topics links simply do a search, which is visible in the search box. If you see that someone is spamming the search, you can add negative search terms ("-something") to filter them out. For example, the search you described could look something like "#unacceptable -download -twitter". You'll lose some legitimate posts, which is unfortunate but tolerable.
Ed Borasky
· 4 months ago
"Figuring out the best possible way to deal with all the issues that Twitter is facing is going to be hard to solve algorithmically, and having editors constantly monitoring everything costs money and raises other issues, such as censorship."
I suspect solving this problem algorithmically is a lot easier than you think. Why? Well, in email spam filtering, the ugliest problem is false positives -- losing emails to a spam filter that are both real emails *and* important emails. Twitter search does not have that problem. There's really no such thing as a false positive in a Twitter search spam filter.
All Comments
great article. You might wanna check out Zensify for the iPhone. We try to solve this exact problem by offering our users trending topics based on what their friends are doing right now, which brings a lot more relevance to trending topics.
We just released a new verison of Zensify yesterday and the details should be in your inbox.
Bastian
Disclaimer: I'm from Zensify
Right now, I think Twitter would rather suffer the spam than lose any perception of slowing growth.
Twitter will figure out how to filter out the spammers that ride the coattails of valid trending topics incessantly. What these people don't realize is that their behavior is only marginally effective at best. It does add noise. Twitter might simply add a report spam button that would pull those tweets out of the trending hashtag stream via an automated algorithm.
mundane trending topics light goodnight will eventually not be in trending topics as they might eventually become blacklisted trending topics very easily with an editorial control on twitters end. "Gaming" trending topics will come to an end soon enough. Twitter is focused on keeping the wheels on the bus.
What is relevant is a bit of an editorial call and at this point twitter does not seem to be overly concerned as a lot of these trending topics fall off the list quickly enough.
Thanks for sharing your thoughs
cheers!
When it comes to something like goodnight, it's part of the human side of twitter cuz as the night goes on this topic rises, however, I can understand it's irrelevance.
Bottom line: twitter needs to make some money so It can develop it's system better, like fixing the trending topics issue. These issues r causing the community to lose trust in the system. Trust needs to be restored & aligned with twitters usefulness & media buzz. Twitter needs to start making some money so it can fix these problems & grow.
Check it out..
http://budurl.com/zxzy
The issue came up last week regarding the Moonfruit hashtag promotion and the words "gaming" the system were used. Legitimate twitter users wanted in on their promotion. I don't expect the people who I follow to have a meaningful tweet every time. If you do, you are likely following the wrong people. It was irrelevant to me that moonfruit may have been a "trending" topic, it was far more relevant to me that some folks I follow suddenly had some funny tweets with what was at the time a bizarre hashtag to me. I'd rather find stuff that way than vs. a "trend", but that is just me.
On that web site you can create twitter topics and live sessions that other people can easily find and follow.
Now it becomes a favorite place for spammers. Gosh =(
I suspect solving this problem algorithmically is a lot easier than you think. Why? Well, in email spam filtering, the ugliest problem is false positives -- losing emails to a spam filter that are both real emails *and* important emails. Twitter search does not have that problem. There's really no such thing as a false positive in a Twitter search spam filter.
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