

Why "trending topics" are so spectacularly useless - sdfx
http://www.collisiondetection.net/mt/archives/2010/01/the_problem_wit.php

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NathanKP
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.

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gsmaverick
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.

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alexro
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.

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notphilatall
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.

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

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Semiapies
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.

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jgrahamc
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.

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thafman
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.

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trixjo
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.

