The “wisdom of the crowd” is not always wise or witty. Sometimes, it’s just plain hormone-induced and the tweenagers over at Twitter say so. That’s the reason teen-idol Justin Bieber has been on the top of Twitter Trending Topics for like ages.
Bieber’s popularity has invaded the Twitterverse and it will be there for good, what with thousands of fans posting about him every second. Even the King of Twitter, @aplusk, could not displace the young Prince of the Twitterverse. That’s if Twitter can’t do anything about it.
So the other day, Twitter made a bit of change in their algorithm:
The new algorithm identifies topics that are immediately popular, rather than topics that have been popular for a while or on a daily basis, to help people discover the ‘most breaking’ breaking news from across the world. (We had previously built in this ‘emergent’ algorithm for all local trends, described below.) We think that trending topics which capture the hottest emerging trends and topics of discussion on Twitter are the most interesting. {via Mashable}
In short, if a topic is so popular that it constantly trends, Twitter will drop it from the list.
For ordinary people, there wasn’t any noticeable different on the Trending Topics — except the Bieber fans. Suddenly, no more Justin Bieber on the Trending Topics, as if Twitter put a permanent ban on the name for good.
Frustrated, thousands of tweeple requested @twitter to un-ban Bieber and allow him to trend again. All that went to deft ears. Despite that, the “wisdom of the so-called crowd” somewhat found a way around or is trying to. Instead of the real name, followers started using and/or hi-jacking hash tags — they temporarily gained traction within hours by using tags such as #pattiesson, #jayb and #LetBieberTrend.
We’re not sure who will win this battle but Bieber fans aren’t gonna give up easily. That’s until Twitter comes up with a another algo change.
Update: That didn’t take too long — jieber and twibier are trending on Twitter.
oh God -__-