Should ‘tonight’ trend?
October 15, 2009
Friending Topics pumps out lists of trending topics, trending hashtags, and trending people from your network. Simple.
We omit certain words and phrases because we think they are noise. It’s mainly obvious stuff like ‘this‘, ‘that‘, etc… as well as a few more sophisticated things around patterns that we see as ‘spammy’. This works pretty well to clean up the random stuff – allowing the real deal to come to the top.
Some feedback has suggested we should also filter out time references like ‘today‘, ‘tonight‘ and ‘tomorrow‘ because these trend for people quite regularly.
So I wanted to explain why we kept them in there, and how we are dealing with this issue to let you get rid of them if they bug you.
Why we keep “tonight”
On my timeline there is an occassional burst of talk about ‘lunch’ or ‘friday pint’ or something happening ‘tonight’.
If I see ‘tonight’ is trending I simply hover it and see what’s happening tonight. It might just be a bunch of babble from people saying “I’m staying in tonight” or “I’ll be working late tonight” but quite often it’s because a TV show, gig, or event is on tonight. That being the case I want to know about it.
In an ideal world we’ll be able to pick out what that event is – turning “new attenborough tonight”, “watch life tonight”, “turtles on life bbc1 tonight” into a link to the show online. That’s for Version 2! For now we think it’s useful to know that everyone is talking about tonight and to get those tweets in a nice little package.
“But I really want to get rid of it”
If you still aren’t convinced – we’re working on a couple of features which allow you to boost / drop certain words and phrases in your lists. So if you don’t want to know about “tonight” just drop it. If you really want to know if “movie” trends even a little, give it a boost.
Watch the twitter feed @friendingtopics to see when that goes live.
Until then, just breath deep and don’t let it bug you safe in the knowledge that we’re working on it!
Friendingtopics's Blog 
October 21, 2009 at 10:20 pm
As someone who follows news trends closely, I’d love to be able to filter out stuff like “open” and “tonight.” I only follow beer people on one account so if I can filter out enough generic terms and tags that I see daily, I can actually get a good idea of what is trending in my niche. “Tonight” is perfect if you follow 50 friends that you actually see in real-life but I don’t care if someone I am following who I will never meet is watching Dancing with the Stars “tonight.”
The idea to allow people to have it both ways is grand.
When do you think this fix will be done? November? 🙂
Very impressed with what you are doing here.
@beersage
October 22, 2009 at 8:06 am
Hi beersage – thanks for the comments – I’m aiming to have the custom ban/boost lists up and running before the end of the month. Working on some tweeks to the UI side to make it as simple as possible to operate without slowing things down before we release it.
October 21, 2009 at 10:21 pm
P.S. PLEASE do not limit the # of terms that we can filter out! I have a feeling that there are a lot of generic one-worders and tags that I want to get rid of.