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Boston doesn't have enough twits
By Kaz on Mon, 08/02/2010 - 5:22pm
Twitter introduced location-specific Trending Topics to give you an idea on what the recent zeitgeist in your area was based on common terms that show up in the stream of all tweets from your area. These topics often cycle in a matter of hours as new news and discussion take over for older topics.
Unfortunately, Boston's Trending Topics have been seemingly stuck on a handful of terms from the early June NBA Finals (with a shout-out to the Tony Awards too) for quite a few weeks now. For those wondering why it's not functioning right for Boston (but fine everywhere else), Twitter posted this on their Help Center:
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.
I guess it's just too hard for them to figure out how to set locality-specific thresholds.
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Comments
Really, Twitter?
You'd think #mbta, if nothing else, would be a permanently trendy topic.
Yeah, I'm not buying it
I have so many questions because of having found this (as opposed to when I thought it was just "broke" for some reason).
* Why would they hard-code the number of tweets from an area as some sort of refreshing mechanism?
* Why wouldn't Boston have enough? Are they claiming too many Bostonians don't list a valid location field? Are they ignoring all of the regional cities/neighborhood names (Brookline, Roxbury, Medford, Cambridge, etc.) and only accepting Boston proper and that's why?
* Why wouldn't you just threshold the refresh rate to some relative evaluation of the region's data so that you could do trending topics for *anywhere* and never have this problem?
* How long could it possibly take to fix a problem like this since it's been 2 months without any change?
Twitter is evil and bad for
Twitter is evil and bad for you.
Does not compute. How does
Does not compute.
How does Boston not have enough twits? It doesn't make any sense, we're probably one of the densest concentrations of twits. Methinks Twitter isn't being completely transparent here.
Geotagging?
How does Twitter know somebody is from the Boston area? Self-applied Twitter geotags? If so, could it be that not enough of us are marking our locations for Twitter's tastes?
Twitter KNOWS
SMS texts have cell tower locales and Twitter.com lets a twitter account specify its location.
Try advanced search http://www.search.twitter.com for tweets within 10mi of Boston MA.
Not geotags
The city-specific trending topics feature came out prior to geotagging of the actual tweets. They based it on your profile's self-described location. If they're still basing it on only that text/coordinates, then my only hypothesis is that they're basing it on the idea of being in Boston and ignoring anyone marked as Cambridge, Medford, Brookline, Roxbury, South End, etc.
You stay classy, WBZ
Evidently, I'm a news maker.
Aug 3, 2010 10:28 am US/Eastern? You're welcome, WBZ.
Next time, why don't you let people know where you got the story from. Thanks.
Just to be specific, it seems like the story comes from their web producer, Lori Lennon (@LoriWBZ) who re-tweeted Adam's twitter post announcing this story at around 5:30 PM on August 2nd...a day before the WBZ story showed up on their website sans any recognition as to where they got it from.
Deeper and deeper
By the way, Lori would like you to know she didn't get it from UHub but some "news story she saw"...even though she RT'd Adam's link to UHub three minutes after he posted it.