According To Twitter’s Trending Topics, Lady Gaga Is Still Trapped On The X Factor
You may have noticed that Lady Gaga has once again breached Twitter’s trending topics. I wonder what she’s done this time? I know – let’s click on the trending topic directly and find out what Twitter has to say about it.
Um, I don’t think so. As the description actually states, Gaga’s performance on The X Factor was back on December 6. It seems extremely unlikely that this would be trending almost a month later, and doing a little research on the (far more reliable) What The Trend? or What The Hashtag? tells me that the real reason Gaga is trending is because she’s announced a tour in South America, including Brazil, in 2010.
If you look closely, #GaGainBrazil is also in Twitter’s top ten, clarifying the meme. And interestingly, they’ve got the right information there.
It’s a good idea to have explanations about the trending topics built into your own website, but it’s really, really poor that nobody has bothered updating this since December 6. Outdated explanations are of less value than no explanation at all.
Sort it out, Twitter. Hire some better people if that’s what it takes. Because if I have to leave your site to find out what is going on within it, you’ve failed.
UPDATE: Seconds after writing this article, Lady Gaga was removed from the trending topics, which is strange as she was nowhere near the bottom when I began to write it. I’m guessing Twitter favoured booting her off the list and having just the one Gaga-related meme, as opposed to, you know, doing a bit of work instead.
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Seems to me (but then, I’m weird) that if the trending topics feature was to be of any value at all (which it isn’t), it would be completely autonomous, running without human input at all. True, all a computer can do is count on its one finger, but it can count very very fast. Count the occurrences of words or phrases, find the top ten, and list them. Yeah, yeah, yeah — throw in some stuff about filtering out “a,” “and,” etc, but that’s all pretty basic stuff.
Now soup it up a little with a subroutine that counts words occurring near your chosen words, like, oh I don’t know — “Brazil” and “concert” near “Lady Gaga”?
Unless, of course, those better people you mentioned include some who can count as fast as the computer.
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Yeah, you would think. That said, the two sites I listed manage to handle the responsibility okay. All it takes is a small but (here’s the key part) dedicated team.
Best to do it brilliantly or not at all.