Twitter angers Bieber fans. Aw, what a shame

17May/100

Twitter angers Bieber fans. Aw, what a shame

Well, it seems as though the folks at Twitter have lost the Bieber Fever. What took them so long is beyond me. But that's another story...

Regular tweeters no doubt noticed that Bieber was a virtual mainstay in the "Trending Topics" list found on the right side of the page for the past few months, but he has recently fallen off. Did Twitter simply begin ignoring tweets with his name? Well, actually...kind of. In reality, they simply changed the algorithm that is used to determine what is currently "trending", but this had a relatively strong impact on the Trending Topics (TTs) and even the tweeters themselves.

Twitter is all about what is happening right now, but apparently their previous algorithm didn't properly reflect that. Instead, it used past information, together with current info, to pull up the most common overall topics. Now, history means nothing, as only current popular topics are listed as trending. Twitter says that this should help people discover the "most breaking" news from across the world.

It still doesn't really make sense to me, though. I've been monitoring the TTs over the past couple days, and they've pretty much stayed the same. "Jick Nonas" has been numero uno for at least the past 36 hours or so, and "Ronnie James", "Jieber", "Twieber" (have I mentioned that I hate Bieber fans?.....), "#stoptalkingabout", and "#tellmegoodbye" have all also been in the top 10 for the past day or so. Are you trying to tell me that people weren't tweeting about anything in the world of sports, movies, politics, or any of the other things that are usually so common? These six topics were really THAT popular this weekend? I doubt it. To test things out, I decided to click on a few of the top TTs and see how many new tweets would come in as I waited for a few minutes. I then did a simple search for some topics that were not trending, but I knew were popular. Amazingly (or not), the topics I searched for were consistently getting many more tweets than the actual trending topics. Now if that doesn't go against Twitters' "what's happening right now?" stance, I don't know what does. Today is Monday, and it is widely known that #musicmonday or #mm is always a top TT on Mondays. But not today. Perhaps never again. Despite getting more tweets over the past half-hour or so than even the supposed #1 TT, Jick Nonas, they do not even crack the top 10 list. Weird.

What I do love about this change, though, is that now that Justin Bieber isn't showing up as a TT anymore, people aren't tweeting about him! At least, not as far as I can tell by searching for his name. Granted, he is still getting more tweets than the current TTs, but not by much. They used to come in around 40, 50, 60, even up to 100 tweets every 30 seconds. As of the new TT requirements, it's down to about 20.

Now if we could only get things like "Jick Nonas", "Twieber", and "Jieber" off the list. I mean seriously, there were 2...yes, a whopping TWO...tweets for "Twieber" over the past minute and a half. I really don't think that counts as "trending". More like "trailing".

I think Twitter is holding back some important info regarding the change in the Trending Topics, and I would love to know what it is, because what they've said so far doesn't at all line up with what's going on. If and when anything else gets released, I'll be sure to write about it. In the meantime, I suggest all of you start tweeting your own names. I mean, it clearly only takes a few to make the list now, right? I think I'll tweet my name about a dozen times and see what happens. Who knows, I could become famous.