Top Tweet

After nearly three years on Twitter I've gotten my first Top Tweet. If you, like me, are wondering what  Top Tweets are, well simply put Top Tweets shows a collection of recent messages that scroll every couple seconds.
That’s what it does, but the bigger question is, How does it work?
For the answer to that question, Twitter’s Chief Scientist, Abdur Chowdhury, explained that there’s no wizard behind the scenes choosing which tweets to show on the new home page. It’s all algorithmic.

"Top Tweets is a new algorithm we developed that finds tweets that are catching the attention of other users," he says. "The algorithm looks at all kinds of interactions with tweets including retweets, favorites, and more to identify the tweets with the highest velocity beyond expectations."

That last bit there is important: the tweets with the highest velocity beyond expectations. Obviously, there’s all kinds of science and computation going on here.

Every Twitter user, it seems, has an expected level of attention and interaction for his/her tweets. If a tweet surpasses expectations, it might hit Top Tweets. And while the home page currently seems to focus on celebrity Twitter users, Chowdhury says that shouldn’t always be the case.

This is intended to highlight Tweets from all users and doesn’t favor those with large follower counts.