On 25 Mar 2011, at 18:49, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote: > > One other note - a tweet that contains multiple Trending Topics is nearly > always spam. I haven't gathered any data, mostly because I'm too lazy to > write the API call management / rate limit logic to automate this. I'd > *almost* be willing to recommend to Twitter that they stop indexing tweets > for Search that match more than one Trending Topic, though. ;-)
To pointlessly prolong the discussion - it being Friday :-) ... Of course that suffers from the same problems, my personal feed follows a lot of UK politics, most of this action takes place during the day when much of the UK is busy. It is not all uncommon to see two trending topics or hashtags in these tweets, and this is especially true when something like a televised debate or random bit of civil unrest is taking place. Instructive for anyone who wishes to see this in action will be the large demonstration in central London tomorrow, I would predict that within several hours of the beginning of the march, if not before, you will see many UK tweets containing at least two TTs, if not three. Indeed, it is a common practice amongst such twitterers - particularly the more provocative and/or confrontational - to include as many popular hashtags as they can fit onto the end of their tweet so as to reach the highest number of people who may have added these to their searches, resulting in multiple trends in some otherwise very short tweets. Now it is certainly the case that these tweets amount to a vanishingly small number of the total number of tweets in any given timeframe, and that the number of people who are interested in them is a vanishingly small proportion of even the UK user base, never mind the entire global base, but for those users those tweets are precisely what they are using twitter for. I guess what I'm getting at here is that any automated filtering system ultimately amounts to making value judgements on behalf of your users. That this fails quite often in - for example - corporate email systems gives me no confidence that any similar approach is going to work for twitter, where the diversity of message content, users, and use cases is vastly more pronounced. But I could - of course - be wrong :-) hax0rsteve -- Twitter developer documentation and resources: http://dev.twitter.com/doc API updates via Twitter: http://twitter.com/twitterapi Issues/Enhancements Tracker: http://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/list Change your membership to this group: http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk
