Commentary
source: http://www.nicolecifani.com/2011/07/social-medi...
Nicole Cifani is a fellow Mozilla-Knight news lab student, and she's building Pop!, which tracks what's grabbing people's attention on twitter and other social networks — all in realtime. As she calls it, a trend tracker on steroids.
Hi Nicole! I hope you don’t mind a bit of scepticism… but wouldn’t you rather have a tool that could spot news that nobody is talking about yet than display trending topics? News has a huge social component —not just social media, in general we just like to talk about current events and share our take with other people — so I don’t want to discount trend tracking off the bat… but you’re going to have to do a damn good job of it to make it into something fresh and appealing.
One of the trending/curation websites I appreciated most was Viewsflow, though they’ve since pivoted to produce PeerIndex and shut down their old site. What they did was not just about spotting trending topics. They algorithmically bubbled up what opinion leaders in economics and other areas were saying and reading. That, for me, was like the special sauce an aggregator needs: not just stuff people talk about, but the promise that I can have a look at the habits, thoughts and conversations of people that matter, without having to wade through tons of twitter messages. It’s more personal that way, and as a result more engaging.
In a nutshell: do you want to produce a trend tracker on steroids, or rather take a trend tracker as your basic idea and spice it up with special sauce? Two very different things, and I kind of like the latter more.
Shameless self-promotion: trends are boring.