Twitter Improves Trending Topic Algorithm, Bye Bieber

In the last few weeks, I (and lots of people) noticed that Justin Beiber was becoming on the Twitter trending topic list. But, not now. For Bieber’s fans, of course this was something cool. For lots of people, it might be something they didn’t care about. Other people also thought that it should be removed. Recently Twitter changed its trending topic algorithm.

The new algorithm identifies topics that are immediately popular, rather than topics that have been popular for a while or on a daily basis, to help people discover the “most breaking” news stories from across the world. (We had previously built in this ’emergent’ algorithm for all local trends, described below.) We think that trending topics which capture the hottest emerging trends and topics of discussion on Twitter are the most interesting. While this is very much a work in progress, with this tweak we have taken a big step toward capturing how trends quickly emerge and grow on Twitter.  We also think it’s compelling to know what the “most popular” topics are, and we will look to capture this in some way in the future.
Source: Twitter Help Source: About Trending Topic.

Like what I wrote in the first paragraph, it’s interesting to see what Bieber’s fans think about this. :)