After a discussion with some of the other interhacktives, two things became readily apparent:
- Being able to search for words accompanying trends on Twitter would be really useful
- Currently, support for “sub-trend” searches is fairly lacking
As an example of the first point: imagine you’re at a conference full of Twitter users, and everyone’s using the hashtag #fakeEvent to talk to each other. This works perfectly fine if everyone’s always in the same room, but what if the conference’s structure was such that attendees had to choose from a variety of talks happening concurrently? Say folks in one talk started using the hashtag “#foo” (to use a long-standing programming convention) to talk about that individual session, while those attending another talk used hashtag “#bar” (to use another), and these were added to the global #fakeEvent hashtag (Example: “@soAndSo says Twitter’s a waste of time… #foo #fakeEvent”). If you’re in either talk and know what the hashtag is, or the global #fakeEvent hashtag isn’t moving very fast, there isn’t a problem. But what if you’re watching an event’s Twitter traffic from afar and don’t know what the additional hashtags are about, or the global hashtag is moving too quickly to find relevant information about a specific aspect of that event? Another example of where this might be true is the worldwide Occupy protests — finding the global hashtag isn’t very difficult, but drilling down into specific subject matter becomes significantly moreso. Continue reading
