Thanks to my buddy Adam over at Universalhub, I caught wind of a little story that might make us Bostonian's a bit pissed off.
According to the post by Max Silver over at BostInnovation, Twitter's topics algorithm isn't picking up anything for Boston. In fact, the trends are old and stale. The trends haven't changed since the NBA Finals and Grand Theft Rondo is still a "trending topic."
Max reached out to Twitter to say, WTF? Us Bostonians are hardcore Twittaaah (Twitter) users so we should be trending like a mutha f*kkaaah. So, he asked Twittaaah what the deal was and got this response:
We are aware that many users may be experiencing stale local Trending Topics for Boston. This is due to a shortage of Tweets coming from the Boston area. The threshold number of Tweets required to refresh the local Trending Topics in Boston is not being reached, so we are unable to refresh the results with more current Trending Topics. We’re sorry for the inconvenience, and we are working to mitigate the problem.
Say waaaah? Shortage of Tweets my ass, which is exactly what Max thought as well so he enlisted our mutual social-friend Dan Zarrella over at Hubspot to do some geeky investigating.
Basically they found that Twittaah's answer was full of shyte:
It is hard to believe that Twitter would take a radius much larger than 50 KM, because that would start to push well outside of most cities, making the idea of city trending topics obsolete. If that is the case, then there must be another reason why Boston’s trending topics are not activating.
Zarrella proposed an interesting theory that Twitter has changed its algorithms, which has in turn killed the trending topics here. Zarrella explained, “I think Twitter finds it very important to be ‘mainstream,’ and in Boston much of the Twitter stream is marketing and tech folks.”
The change in the trending topic algorithm might be an attempt to prevent certain topics from gaming the system or spamming the feed. This would make it harder for technology and marketing topics to trend and easier for other topics to trend.
So is Twittaah ignoring us Bostonians? What's the real deal here Twittaah? Don't get us baked beans eating mad men pissed off at you. Don't you know that this is the city where The Departed was shot, er, filmed. Do you really want us on your bad side?
I think not. So, until you fix it, I'm suggesting to all my Bostonian Twittaah friends to trend this: #fu-twittaah.
Waddya say? You with me Boston?