Saturday, September 19, 2009

Twitter Unsuccessfully Explains Trends

Twitter introduced a new feature to explain the reason behind the trending topics.It gives a short explanation about why a particular topic is trending right now.

Currently another service whatthetrend is doing similar things.Twitter says that some topic descriptions are sourced from whatthetrend.

IMHO it is not working as per the expectation though.Let us look at few trending topics to understand the details.
"goodmorning" is one of the trending topics right now in Twitter .When you click on it it shows the explanation as
"Goodmorning sometimes trends when people wake up and greet their tweeps."
(check the above image)
Whatthetrend shows the reason as following.
"It's a good morning for many people somewhere right now. For some reason, people don't use the space bar."

compare the results for "Ahoy".
twitter:

whatthetrend:

compare the results for "pirate day".
twitter:

whatthetrend:

From the above three observations it seems that twitter is able to give explanation for well known terms only.Twitter says that some of the descriptions are sourced from whatthetrend ,but I didn't find anything to believe this.whatthetrend allows users to Edit and tweet the blurb ,twitter is just showing the explanation.I think we are going to see these improvements on twitter over coming weeks.You can continue using whatthetrend until twitter provides these.Who knows ,twitter might acquire whatthetrend also.

Credit:thenextweb

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