Should ‘tonight’ trend?

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!

Why no topics?

Our first FAQ – “Why did my topics list disappear / shrink?”

This one is simple. Friending Topics looks at recent tweets from people you follow and looks for patterns – if it finds none, it reports none – if it finds lots it reports lots.

Now the question is what do we mean by ‘recently’? We’re testing this at the moment – the challenge is that some people see two tweets an hour, some 2,000. Until we get a feel for the flow of your particular twitter timeline we’ll over/under estimate what ‘recently’ means for you and might produce an over long or over short topics list.

Hopefully we’re pretty close for most users.

As we scale up we are also artificially limiting the number of tweets we consider when calculating the reports. This may affect the reports for people following high numbers of accounts. If you think that might be happening to you and want the limit lifted tweet me and I’ll check what’s going on.