Early April, micro-blog Twitter had launched “trends”, which told users at 1 glance what people were talking about on Twitter at any given moment, & at a single glance.
Starting today, Twitter had decided to update “trends experience”. Explaining this on its official blog, Zhenghua Li, Engineering Manager, wrote: Every second on Twitter, thousands of Tweets are sent. Since 2008, trends have been the one-stop window into the Twitter universe, providing users with a great tool to keep up with breaking news, entertainment and social movements.
Li further wrote that until recently, trends were only presented as a simple list of phrases or hashtags, occasionally leaving users puzzled as to why something like “Alps,” “Top Gear” or “East Village” was trending. To learn more, users had to click on the trend & go through related tweets. Today’s update now ensured that Twitter would algorithmically provide trend context for certain tailored trends users. Not only will that improve usability, but also motivates users to engage even more, she added.
Context for the new trends experience may include the following data:
- A description: Short text descriptions are presented to explain the meaning of a trend.
- An image: Surfacing a relevant image will provide users with direct visual knowledge.
- Twitter-specific information: The volume of tweets & retweets of a trend, or the time in which it started trending, will help users understand the magnitude of conversation surrounding the topic.
Much of Li’s blog is technical & goes into great detail on how the “system” works. Suffice to say, Twitter trends will strive to surface relevant & real time contextual information.
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