Online Display Ads: The Brand Awareness Black Hole. Is Twitter popping the filter bubble or inflating it? One of the fears about the explosion of information online is that users might become more narrow in their interests — either because they are overwhelmed by the amount of content choices facing them, or because personalization filters will wind up catering to their existing preconceptions . In a recent post on the topic, Cornell University communications professor Tarleton Gillespie makes exactly that kind of criticism about Twitter’s algorithms , and specifically its “trending topic” filters. Handing over more of our information consumption to companies like Twitter may make our lives easier, but does it also make them narrower as well — and if so, what do we do about it? Gillespie’s argument starts off with a discussion of how various “Occupy Wall Street” topics failed to trend on Twitter despite the frenzy of activity around those subjects during the demonstrations in New York and elsewhere.
Like Google’s search algorithm, Twitter is a black box. Twitter’s big problem: It still needs better filters. Things couldn’t be better at Twitter, CEO Dick Costolo told attendees at a conference on Tuesday, saying the business is going “phenomenally well,” and the company is “confident we have a hit on our hands” with its Promoted Tweets feature for advertisers.
So why launch yet another new version of its Discover tab? Because even Costolo admits that Twitter needs to get better at figuring out a user’s “interest graph” and recommending topics and content to them, something the CEO says he plans to devote a lot of time to this year. And that makes sense, because services like News.me, Zite and Prismatic are also busy trying to fill that gap. The original launch of the Discover tab, for both the web version of Twitter and its various iOS and other apps, came last fall amid a revamp of the website — one that founder and product lead Jack Dorsey said was designed to make it easier for new users to find things that might interest them.
Will the new discovery features bring more users?