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Posts Tagged ‘trending’

Last year, OneRiot ventured into the advertising world with RiotWise, an ad format which places content in an emphasized position in their realtime feed. The search engine also launched a pilot program of RiotWise Trending Ads, a stream of ads that correspond to trending topics as they emerge across the social web, that has since been integrated into the search engine’s API. Today, the realtime search startup is improving upon its advertising product by offering Trending Ad unit that automatically updates in realtime corresponding to the the most popular trending topics at the time.

The ability to update in realtime allows OneRiot to show advertiser content that is relevant to trending topics as they emerge on networks like Twitter, Facebook and the web. The ads are available via standard-size IAB Ad Units and is enabled by OneRiot’s realtime search technology and PulseRank relevancy algorithm. And previously, OneRiot’s “Trending Ads” were available only via OneRiot’s API. This meant that developers had to integrate the raw feed into their applications, and create their own UI. The new ad unit allows any website currently monetizing with standard static ad units to display RiotWise Trending Ads.

In order to implement he new ad unit, publishers need to integrate Trending Ad Units in the same way they would call standard ad units. The ads will then link to realtime and relevant content from OneRiot’s network of media partners. One Riot claims that the realtime relevance of the ads leads to click through rates at four times the average rates.

Currently OneRiot’s trending ads have been used on Twitter apps (ÜberTwitter) and desktop clients (Digsby). OneRiot shares revenue with the application developer. As we’ve written in the past, OneRiot runs the risk of surfacing irrelevant or spammy content with realtime ads, especially is the ads are refreshing constantly to match trending topics. But as a realtime search engine, OneRiot has invested heavily in spam prevention and is constantly sorting through millions of pieces of content to determine what is relevant and what isn’t. Regardless, it seems like a viable monetization tool for developers.

The startup, which just raised $7 million in funding, has been steadily innovating its product and is gathering up partners quickly. The realtime stream ramped up this year with all the big players adding functionality to their search offerings and OneRiot was smart to get in the game early.

Google is already taking a page out of Twitter’s playbook with the recent launch of Buzz, which lets everyone on Gmail broadcast public status updates, share links, blog posts, photos, videos, and more. But Google, which tried and failed to buy Twitter last year, is still studying its various features and building some of them into its own services. The next one it might borrow from Twitter is trending topics. Twitter exposes the keywords people are using the most or growing fastest at any given time under Trending Topics in the sidebar or in Twitter search.

Now some people are noticing similar trending topics in the left sidebar of Google News when they are logged in. Joe Hobot captured the screenshot at left on his blog. Some of the trending topics earlier today were “Greece” (which is considering an economic austerity plan) “Iran” (which is facing U.N. sanctions over its nuclear program), “Mobile Technology” and “smartphones” (no doubt due to the Mobile World Congress kicking off in Barcelona today). Google already shows the relative popularity of news topics in Google Trends, but showing them in Google News is probably more helpful.

The trending topics, though, appear to be part of a larger redesign. We’ve been getting other reports and images of a Google News redesign bucket test. (See image below). The redesign also has personalization options which let you customize Google News by location or category (business, world, etc.).

Of course, MyYahoo did this ten years ago, but it’s good to see Google News finally getting around to letting people personalize their news pages.

As you can see in the picture, Twitter has started to roll out its new Local Trends feature which takes the standard Trending Topics data and uses Twitter’s geolocation functionality to make it based on location. Twitter team members Ryan Sarver and Raffi Krikorian have confirmed it is starting to roll out. We noted this feature back in November when Twitter said there would be an API for it, but unlike actual geolocation, they’re clearly going to be featuring on the main website as well. This is a big part of Twitter’s effort to clean up the Trending Topics area which has become overrun with spam.

While only a limited number of users can see it right now, user LisaBarone was able to capture it in action. As you can see, she only captured the ability to switch your city or country to find trends based on the location. Look for more screenshots soon.

Update: And here’s another from Barone.

Update 2: Twitter Platform Director Ryan Sarver has tweeted us a bit more information about the feature. Apparently, “Coachella” is a term only trending in LA and San Francisco, which makes sense since it’s a concert based in California. As you can see in the screenshot below, “LAFD” is also trending in LA.

So, as the entire web seems to be talking about at the moment, Gmail is down. But what’s amazing is the volume of people talking about it. When I first noticed it being down, I did a Twitter search and just minutes later there were over 10,000 new results. A couple minutes later, there were over 20,000.

It took a few minutes for it to show up on Trending Topics, but now it’s there, but it was giving Twitter Search fits. For a while, if you clicked on “Gmail” in Trending Topics, you would have seen “No results for [blank]” returned. If you hit it again, its kept stacking the messages on top of one another (pictured below).

It looks like Twitter has resolved the issue, and made a strong comeback, but the influx of tweets continues to be amazing. This could be a good test for Twitter to see if it can stay up and everyone bitches about one of the most popular web services on the planet being down. And remember, this test comes before that new datacenter is in operation.

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Twitter is getting a ton of spam tonight for the hashtag #sept2nd along with vague sounding warnings about something bad happening on that date. There’s also a YouTube video and a Digg story that is just starting to get clicks.

What is it? Some 4Chan users are trying to stir up some good old fashioned fear. A message urges readers to “Write “9/02/09″ on flyers, stickers, currency, walls, etc. and put them EVERYWHERE….Tweet with the hashtag #sept2nd. Get it into the trending topics….Help get the youtube video into the popular section (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IT6N_PZuY-Q)…Spam Google with “9.02.09″”

This is much more likely to create a big annoyance for everyone rather than the intended effect of “its gonna be hilarious seeing everyone freak out.” Traditionally 4Chan has been much better at just raining on parades than than creating any serious mayhem.

But there’s an upside, too. All those people twittering out that hashtag make up an excellent and tidy block list.

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There’s been a lot of chatter recently about the reliability of Twitter’s trending topics and how to make sense of hashtags. Hashtags are words preceded by a “#” which denote what the Tweet is about and makes it easier to search for Tweets about specific topics and events. This weekend’s “Moonfruit” and “GorillaPenis” trending topics on Twitter were examples of trending topics that aren’t easily recognizable and aren’t current events. Personally, I find trending topics and hashtags to be confusing at times because there’s little context surround them on Twitter. And many of the Trending Topics aren’t necessarily breaking news and is often polluted by spam. What The Hashtag is a site launched to solve this exact problem.

What The Hashtag provides detailed definitions and context of hashtags and trending topics on Twitter. But what makes the site even more interesting is that it provides hashtag use stats, top contributors to a particular hashtag, real-time hashtag stream monitoring, and charts. For example, the entry for the hashtag #moonfruit has a graph charting the frequency of the hashtag in Tweets sent out in a given time period, a detailed description of the context behind the Moonfruit, how many Tweets included Moonfruit (443,217) and a real-time stream of Tweets with the Moonfruit hashtag.

What The Hashtag reports that it has analyzed and tracked 2,775 hashtags since its launch in February 2009. So far the site has 800 registered users (registration needed for detailed info entry; simple definitions can be submitted without account). The site is adding the ability to Tweet from the site and opening up its API in the near future.

What The Trend, which we reviewed here, is a fairly similar service that also makes sense of trending topics and hashtags on Twitter. The two services have many of the same features but a few differences. What The Trend pulls in news stories and photos about trending topics, but doesn’t include some of the analytics and graphing that What The Hasthag offers. It appears that What The Hashtag’s details goes more in-depth with the detailed descriptions and stats, but both sites are pretty useful when trying to make sense of Twitter’s enigmatic Trending Topics.

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