Alarms are buzzing on the West Coast, the webs are buzzing on the East Coast, and mentions of last night’s scheduled programming are finally fading off of internet trending topics lists. Drowsily, rows of terms made popular by observant, deliberate web users begin to emerge, fueled by the the day’s most pertinent international issues, underground movements and pharmaceutical advances.
No, you say? #chrisbrownsbowtie was trending for TWENTY-NINE hours, you say? His !*#$@ BOWTIE!?, you say?
Sigh.
In all fairness, we saw it coming. People don’t read newspapers, people read People, and with over 50 million of them on the world’s favorite microblogging site, what areas of interest could we really expect those trending topics to represent? Still, those of us with long Twitter histories remember a day when those widgets offered rows things worth the discovering, and though we wouldn’t say they’ve lost their value, we would say they’ve taken on a new one - one that’s just not quite as fun for us old-timers.
Thankfully, there’s a sunny side up to this death waffle, and while it reads like a politician’s crafty on-air response, it is true nonetheless: The good stuff hasn’t gone away; in fact, there’s more of it than ever before– it’s just hidden right now.
Trending topics lists (including ours), are currently restricted by a few limiting factors:
1) Filtering capabilities: These lists aren’t designed to filter for microtrends, just the big stuff.
2) Demand: Sites that use these lists aim to maximize the list’s user value, so it’s not within a site’s best interest to serve up anything other than what the majority of people are interested in.
3) The Jonas Brothers
Savvy readers will note that those three reasons are one and the same; not so savvy reade-– crap. We lost them.
Anyway - the point here is that until internet users have been classified into subgroups according to, at the very least, interests (at the very most: demographics, psychographics, innie/outie), there’s no quick way to create an accurate, realtime, conveniently widgetized view of microtrends. We can build it - the right data is there - but it just hasn’t been done yet.
Until this need is fulfilled (which it certainly will be, and likely very soon), here’s something you can do create your own cultivated view of trending topics:
1) Select a few of your favorite websites
2) Search for them on OneRiot using the full web address (ex: www.oneriot.com)
3) On the related search page, click “Track this topic”
4) Nab that RSS
5) Smush all the stuff you’re tracking into one place. You can use a reader, landing page, or Twitter for this (if you go the Twitter route, use Twitterfeed, which will allow you to set some nice controls on your content flow).
Your resulting list of links will reflect trending news, stories and videos ( or even MP3s) within your personal set of interests, which is a pretty sweet, pretty solid fix for the current state of things. If you’re the code-crafty type, you can even run that stuff through a widget and share with the planet. That is, unless your interests include #chrisbrownsbowtie, in which case - we’ve got that covered, thanks.
I wrote a lesson about this for the book. Twitter has a long way to go before it can truly improve and make trends useful again. At this time, they’re completely useless and need to be completely re-designed and I believe that pushing trends to the front page was a stupid idea considering how easy they are to manipulate and hack.
Twitter has a long way to go before it can truly improve and make trends useful again
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