Finally, Twitter will be allowing tweets to be searched by most popular and not just most recent, according to an update from Twitter Developer Advocate Taylor Singletary. The switch constitutes a plate shift for the company, which to date has given equal weight to all users in search results, filtering them only by time.
Developers of Twitter apps will soon be able to present tweets sorted according to popularity thanks to a new metadata section to in the search results payload served to apps.
Singletary explained the new feature on the Twitter API message board:
The Search team is working on a beta project that returns the most popular
tweets for a query, rather than only the most recent tweets. This is a beta
project, but an important first step to surface the most popular tweets for
users searching Twitter.You can expect many improvements as we tune and tweak our algorithms, but we
want to give everyone a heads up so we can go over the implications for
those consuming the search API.
The feature tweak implies that Twitter’s usefulness has grown beyond real-time socializing to providing a filterable index of web activity. Some folks may be put off by the feature will introduce a hierarchy among tweets that had been left to third parties to date. The competition to improve in the official popularity rankings will likely have the same effect that publicly displaying follower numbers—competition and ego-boosting will ensure even more rabid use of the service.
We’ve reached out to both Singletary and Twitter CEO Evan Williams for comment on the new feature and will update the post if we hear back.
Update:Twitter VP of Communications Sean Garrett tells us the company hasn’t decided whether search.twitter.com will also provide tweets ranked by popularity. As for the broader implications, Garret says “our intent here is to explore the impact of relevance as it meets recency.”
