Twitter is cleaning up trending topics by returning more relevant results when you look up popular keywords people are tweeting about.
One of the neatest little features that grew out of the Twitter phenomenon last year were these trending topics. The company adopted them after acquiring search engine Summize. They pick up popular keywords or phrases that the community is buzzing about, and they've been a useful way to find out about news (see sample at right).
But as Twitter has grown in size, its topics have been more and more mainstream (and dare I say, dumb?) One of the top terms for the last hour is #whenimdrunk, where people tweet about what they do when they're drunk.
Plus spammers jump on trending topics by including the words in their tweets, so they'll show up in search results when people click on the keywords.
And then there are people who genuinely join in on the conversation -- but so many of them start tweeting that it crowds out original sources on the subject. For example, even though the fallout from the Iranian elections on the Twitter community was extraordinary, if you tried to find out what was happening through Twitter, you'd just find thousands of tweets from people in places like Texas or Washington. (Not very useful if you want to know what's happening on the ground.)
Spokesperson Jenna Sampson wrote in a blog post today:
"...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. The improvement won't be very noticeable at first, but this is a small step toward unearthing more value in search and getting you more relevant results."
The interesting issue here is that despite all of its growth over the past year, Twitter actually needs substantially more data to do real work with trends. It could do trends by location, trends by people you follow, or trends by lists you've created. If Twitter can hold onto its growth pace, in six months to a year we'll start seeing the good stuff.