At the end of April, Twitter introduced a real-time search feature integrated into the web interface.  This also included a listing of trending topics.  Since then there’s been an increase in memes that seem to be aimed at manipulating the trending topics. Some examples of these are: #turnons, #turnoffs, #inappropriatemovies and #notagoodlook.  Twitterers participate in some of the memes (i.e. #squarespace and #moonfruit) because of the promise of a free iPod.  More notable memes were #unfollowdiddy and #unfollowperez.  On any day these memes occupied all the spots on the trending topics list.  I remember several people complaining that Twitter was turning into MySpace because of the memes.

Within the last month or so, I’ve noticed that even though I still see some of these memes in my Twitter stream I don’t see them in trending topics.  I’ve seen complaints about trending topics being removed.  Complaints also include results related to the trending topic being removed from Twitter search as well as users themselves being completely removed from Twitter search.  Many have suggested various reasons for this but it is my opinion that Twitter is cracking down on intentional trending.

This is speculation since Twitter has not answered questions about why various trending topics were removed.  It is pretty clear that they are removing things from trending topics.  At this point, however, I do not know how they are determining what to remove and what to keep.  Hash tags like #sytycd and #pdf09 are allowed to trend.  Are people reporting certain hash tags and memes to Twitter for removal?  Does Twitter’s staff decide which trends to remove?  Or is it done via an algorithm of some sort?

Whatever it is that they are doing, there should be some way to challenge their decision to remove a trending topic.  So far I have seen that (un)conferences like #privacydc, #cfp09 and #openvideo have had no problems using their hash tags on Twitter.  But what happens if they somehow become flagged as spam (or whatever the process is)?  Coverage of entire events would be lost.  Twitter needs to come clean about what they are doing and also provide a way for “legitimate” trends to challenge being blocked.

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