Inference

As Twitter continues to grow and we start following more people, the signal to noise ratio starts to drop. When I check into Twitter I find it really hard to get an idea of what my friends are talking about by looking at my stream. While the Trending Topics in Twitter gives me an idea of what every one is talking about, it doesn’t really interest me personally. So we set out to fix these two problems and we feel we have a really good solution for both.

Trending Conversations

Cadmus finds similar posts in your stream and groups them together. It also takes @replies and links them into a conversation. By doing this we get a cluster of posts that represent a conversation. We then place the most relevant conversations on top. We also present them in different time spans. The end result is that you can easily see the top conversations among your friends and also participate in them.

Trending Topics

Cadmus also looks at the posts your friends are making and picks up on trending topics. This gives you a clear idea about what is the most discussed topics among your friends. By indexing this in real-time, it is also a great way to see these discussion evolve. This helps track the buzz on product announcements and news topics. And since we are tracking trends among your friends, you are not going to get the noise that you usually see through Twitter’s Trending Topics.

Incidentally, I had a great chance to test this as I watched the “Google Buzz” trending topic steadily rise until it became the most important thing all my friends were talking about. It was also utterly fascinating to watch the posts come through on this in real-time.

With Trending Conversations and Topics we feel we have taken a huge step forward in helping people make sense of all the information they see through their social media services. So give them a try and let us know what you think.

Thanks to @mliao for reading over this post.