Over the weekend a lot of tech bloggers got into a tizzy over a suggestion that Twitter search should rank Tweets by authority, with Tweets from people who have the most followers coming up first. Some bloggers quickly objected that this was somehow undemocratic or would give spammers more of an incentive to trick people into following them, and thus would be easy to game. One developer went ahead and created exactly that search experience with Twitority
anyway. (Update: Make that two, check out Twithority also). While others didn’t understand what the big deal was in the first place because their relatives in Scranton have never heard of Twitter (sigh).
One thing that is clear is that there needs to be a better way to filter Twitter as it grows into a broader public communications and publishing system I like to think of Twitter as public IM. But with possibly more than one billion Tweets out there, how do you know which ones to pay attention to? What is the best way to measure the authority of a Tweet (and, thus, where it should rank as a Twitter search result)? A better proxy for authority than the absolute number of followers someone has on Twitter may be how many times their messages get retweeted.
