What is the value of a tweet?
All tweets are not created equal
Clearly some tweets are more informative, entertaining, insightful, amusing or provocative than others. However, it is becoming increasingly difficult to discover these more valuable tweets as the usage of Twitter continues to grow.Problems with Twitter search
Twitter search is one tool designed to help solve this problem but it is currently very basic as it only supports a default "most recent" sort for the results from a specific query. There are usually lots of low value tweets in this result set as the only requirement for a tweet to make the list was having been recently sent.It seems that Twitter needs a better way to help the best tweets bubble up to the surface. I'm proposing that the way to accomplish this is to assign each tweet a value.Just as a web page can be assigned a score so that Google can return the top match for a query it will become increasingly important for tweets to have scores so that people can find the most valuable tweet(s) on a topic. In other words, what is the equivalent of "page rank" for Twitter?Implications of a tweet's value
The implications of being able to determine a tweet's value are powerful and include the following:
In my next post I'll discuss what components should go into the value score for a tweet and how we might go about calculating this value.
Clearly some tweets are more informative, entertaining, insightful, amusing or provocative than others. However, it is becoming increasingly difficult to discover these more valuable tweets as the usage of Twitter continues to grow.Problems with Twitter search
Twitter search is one tool designed to help solve this problem but it is currently very basic as it only supports a default "most recent" sort for the results from a specific query. There are usually lots of low value tweets in this result set as the only requirement for a tweet to make the list was having been recently sent.It seems that Twitter needs a better way to help the best tweets bubble up to the surface. I'm proposing that the way to accomplish this is to assign each tweet a value.Just as a web page can be assigned a score so that Google can return the top match for a query it will become increasingly important for tweets to have scores so that people can find the most valuable tweet(s) on a topic. In other words, what is the equivalent of "page rank" for Twitter?Implications of a tweet's value
The implications of being able to determine a tweet's value are powerful and include the following:
- Tweet search can sort tweets for any term on value, not just timeliness.
- A user can see any other user's most valuable tweets to help decide whether or not to follow.
- Digests can be created to summarize the most valuable tweets for a given topic or a given time period.
- Spam should get filtered out since it would have a very low value.
In my next post I'll discuss what components should go into the value score for a tweet and how we might go about calculating this value.
