14 DAY TRIAL // Twitter has a very open attitude, allowing any developer to access much of the service and its users to express themselves as freely as possible, but this openness has a downside, namely it makes it very easy for spammers to take over. Twitter has been battling this problem for quite a while now, but without too much success. Now, it's finally turning its attention to the Twitter Trends and has announced that it will begin to curate them to remove the spammy ones and make sure they stay relevant to the users.
“As Twitter grows and the number of tweets each day continues to astound us, we’ve noticed an increasing amount of clutter in the public timeline, especially with trending topics. Trends began as a useful way to find out what’s going on but has grown less interesting due to the noisiness of the conversation,” Twitter's Jenna Dawn wrote.
“So, today we're starting to experiment with improvements to trends that will help you find more relevant tweets. Specifically, we're working to show higher quality results for trend queries by returning tweets that are more useful,” she added. Twitter doesn't want to interfere with the process too much, so it's taking a more cautious approach. This means that the differences won't be too noticeable at first, but, as Twitter refines its methods, users should begin to see a much cleaner Trending Topics section.
Twitter doesn't spell it out, but it does look like it will begin to actively influence the trends in one form or another. It's not sure if it's going to use an automated method, a manual one, or a combination of the two. Not only will the differences be mostly unnoticeable at first, but it also looks like they may be limited to a small subset of users, as it's doing with the Retweet feature now and as it did with the Lists in the past. There are also some indications that this may be part of a greater effort at Twitter to improve the quality of the content, not only in the Trends, but possibly also in the search.