Lucian Marin
Rank me up
Please, don’t. At least not on social networks like Twitter. Some days ago Eric Schmidt had an interview published on ReadWriteWeb and it’s about what the web will look like in five years. One of his questions was “We can index real-time info now – but how do we rank it?”.
Google’s approach to the web is to rank everything. But on Twitter we all are equal to each other, we have the same number of characters to write a message (140, remember?), the number of followers doesn’t matter, the time when you joined Twitter is not important, lists or favourites won’t help either. So basically we don’t need a ranking system on Twitter.
Dave Winer votes for ranking on his blog. But what we really need is an exclusion system. First, we need to exclude spam. Then exclude retweets and reposition the original tweet instead of the last retweet, with the number of retweets as a possible importance level. Favourites could also matter in ranking tweets up, but again, keeping them sorted by date is more important.
After all that being said, he thinks that will be (impossible) possible to rank real time information, but it won’t be that clever.