I'm bookmarking this to read later, but how much more sophisticated does the algorithm have to be than:
1) Create a list of 500 - 1000 active, relatively popular Twitter users: this would eliminate most celebrities who only tweet casually or delegate it to their PR people...presumably, by the time they tweet something, it's already huge.
2) Segregate the sample group of Twitter users into cliques
3) When any topic spreads between multiple cliques at an accelerated rate, that topic will likely trend
In addition, have a list of mega-popular celebrities and assume that most of what they tweet has a high probability of being a trending topic.
Twitter has some kind of formula for removing constantly-popular topics (or else Justin Bieber would forever be on the list)...if there's an easy way to include that, then it seems like predicting trending would be straightforward?
1) Create a list of 500 - 1000 active, relatively popular Twitter users: this would eliminate most celebrities who only tweet casually or delegate it to their PR people...presumably, by the time they tweet something, it's already huge.
2) Segregate the sample group of Twitter users into cliques
3) When any topic spreads between multiple cliques at an accelerated rate, that topic will likely trend
In addition, have a list of mega-popular celebrities and assume that most of what they tweet has a high probability of being a trending topic.
Twitter has some kind of formula for removing constantly-popular topics (or else Justin Bieber would forever be on the list)...if there's an easy way to include that, then it seems like predicting trending would be straightforward?