Hi: some questions regarding the popular tweets feature. These are all based on a user-end interaction with search.twitter.com.
1. Is popular search moving to home page search at any point or is it just staying on search.twitter.com? I wanted to know if the home page will just be showing recent tweets as it does now. 2. What is the "refresh rate" if you will of popular tweets over a given time period? What does "recent retweets" mean because there are instances where that applies to minutes and others where the tweets generating the popularity are hours or even a day old? As in, when does one Tweet replace another tweet as a popular result for a given query. This seems to vary across different search queries with some being more stagnant than others. 3. Is there a "drop-off" point for the popular results for a given query after the numbers of retweets subside that the results are taken off or do they just stay there indefinitely until replaced? 4. Do you have a way of determining when irrelevant popular tweets have been maliciously set as the result for a given query and will they be actively taken off? Here are some examples. For the past twelve hours or so a search for "#nowplaying" has yielded the following: http://twitpic.com/1cokv3/full It almost seems as if the use of the popular tweet ranking in this case actually takes away from the real-time search experience by having dated tweets at the top of the queries. Once new results arise for the query, these tweets are gone which gives way to a real-time feed but initially these popular tweets are there and in this case none of the leading tweets that are "popular" actually have the utility expected from a user (i.e., users seem to use the "#nowplaying" search as a way to scroll through tweets like "#nowplaying Clocks - Coldplay). It seems that for a query like this where users generally just scroll through the list of results as a way to discover new music or even other users and thus generally do not retweet individual tweets that often for the query, there is a level of stagnation where old tweets linger for hours as opposed to more active queries where individual tweets gain attention. Additionally, the popular search ranking in this case has no way or weeding out artificial results that are not query related. The top result from the image above is actually an advertisement being run by a company that contains a link leading to this: http://twitpic.com/1coml8/full A search for instances of the two most popular tweets using the text content of each one to show recent instances where they have been retweeted shows the following results: http://twitpic.com/1colcd/full http://twitpic.com/1com2o/full The most recent tweet of both the first and second most popular tweet is by the same account. Here's a look at that account, which seems to be set up for a very specific purpose. http://twitpic.com/1comde/full There's also this account which retweets the top "#nowplaying" query. The account is also clearly set up for a very specific purpose and is retweeting a tweet that does not give users the expected query result for a "#nowplaying" search. http://twitpic.com/1comgd/full This seems to show that the method of curating popular tweets may need to take into account the retweet versus the output rate for a given query otherwise the system can easily be taken advantage of to give users irrelevant results based on similar tactics. That is, for the "#nowplaying" search, even though thousands of tweets are being outputed by users, not many of them are being retweeted so all it takes is for someone to alter that dynamic as is the case here and because of the "refresh rate" for the query, irrelevant results can sit at the top for an extended period of time. But in cases where a twitter users with involved followers starts a discussion, the popular tweet ranking not only picks up on that effectively but it also allows new users to the conversation to have a reference point as is the case here (with the user's tweet being listed first and then legitimate popular tweets right after): http://twitpic.com/1coyhy/full And in cases where there is news or an event, it seems that retweeting of a legitimate news source for a query leads to an instance where a news source is immediately available as a result for the query. http://twitpic.com/1cp7sh/full In both of these examples, "recent" is truly recent as it happens almost instantaneously. However, these are still instances for even the more popular queries where using retweets over a given period of time as a measure of popularity can lead to irrelevant query results unless the refresh rate of the "retweet count" somehow takes into account the fact that a single instance of numerous retweets might not necessarily be relevant a fixed amount of time later. In efffect, the popular tweets feature can lead to instances where the content being generated about a topic has moved beyond what was popular and being retweeted even a few hours ago. So you end up with a part of Twitter that is actually slower than the rest of it. Here's an example of that using a popular query: http://twitpic.com/1cp61k/full http://twitpic.com/1cp7pt/full The first image shows the query results and the second a search of the text contained in the third most popular tweet. Although this is a query for which there is always a tremendous amount of output, the third "most popular" tweet about is one that a content search reveals the last retweet to have been ninteen hours ago. Additionally, the content of the tweet is not relevant to a current query about the topic. This indicates that there is sometimes no direct relationship between "recent" number of retweets and current output of content. Osman Ali @namsoila -- To unsubscribe, reply using "remove me" as the subject.
