As you may or may not know, Boston trending topics have been “broken” for quite some time now. By broken, I mean they have not changed since the NBA finals, still featuring ‘Grand Theft Rondo’ as the top topic.
Like most people, I accepted that Twitter was just struggling to fix a bug for the first week or so. But once the trending topics had not changed for a month, I knew something was up. Every day there were more and more tweets asking Twitter what was wrong with the trending topics, which eventually provoked Twitter to post 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.
Among the Boston Tweeps who were particularly outspoken about the fact they believed that Boston did tweet enough was Tom O’Keefe (better known as BostonTweet). He told me, “I’m not buying Twitter’s explanation. I will admit that the summer months have been very slow in the Twitterverse, but that’s indicative of all cities and all online traffic.”
This is a sentiment I echo, I found it hard to believe that Baltimore, Houston, and Philadelphia all tweet enough to have trending topics, while Boston doesn’t.
To get to the truth on this matter I asked Hubspot employee, the social media scientist, Dan Zarrella to help me gather some data, and analyze what he found. He took Boston and Baltimore, and measured their tweets per minute on Friday the 13th, around 1 pm. (This is rough data taken over a short period of time)
100KM Radius
Boston: Tweets per Minute: 169.49152542373 (1500 total tweets analyzed over 8.85 minutes)
Baltimore: Tweets per Minute: 394.73684210526 (1500 total tweets analyzed over 3.8 minutes)
50KM Radius
Boston: Tweets per Minute: 132.74336283186 (1500 total tweets analyzed over 11.3 minutes)
Baltimore: Tweets per Minute: 130.4347826087 (1500 total tweets analyzed over 11.5 minutes)
25KM Radius
Boston: Tweets per Minute: 114.06844106464 (1500 total tweets analyzed over 13.15 minutes)
Baltimore: Tweets per Minute: 82.342177493138 (1500 total tweets analyzed over 18.216666666667 minutes)
Baltimore, whose trending topics are turned on, only has more tweets per minute during this time at the 100KM radius, which is a very large range (and would include all of Washington DC). At 50K Boston (as pictured above) and Baltimore (as pictured below) are nearly dead even on tweets per minute.
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.
If this is true, Twitter has altered one of the core ideals of the site: to read an unfiltered version of the news. This has not been proven yet, but as Zarrella told me, “it’s impossible to say how twitter trending topics algorithm works, but I do know it’s gotten harder and harder over the past few years for marketing and tech folks to trend.”
While this has not been proven yet, that is not to say it cannot be. We are looking to the social analytics companies and people in Boston to help us get to the bottom of this!
Leave us your thoughts in the comments below.
