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"We've highlighted the problem of malicious links and spam permeating Twitter trends several times before, but the problem is getting worse, fast. If Twitter doesn't fix it soon, Twitter Trends will simply become a huge pile of irrelevant content, spam and links that lead to viruses and spyware. \nCase in point: \"Bruno\" is trending right now. I've clicked the trend to see some early user reviews, but instead I got overwhelmed with spam, pointing to http://stream-onlinemovies.com or http://buffermovies.com/, sites that offer \"full movie downloads.\" Since this is a legitimate trending topic, many of the tweets are real, but if spammers start infusing their links into trends for every hit movie, finding useful tweets will become a chore. \nThen, there's \"Pirates\". It's a Facebook game, and it's trending because a bunch of spammy accounts are linking to it. It might have started from another Somali Pirates incident, which happened a couple of days ago, but right now, it's a completely illegitimate trending topic, overwhelmed with thousands of messages such as \"Hey, just did a Plunder in Pirates, can you send me an Energy Boost?\" Interestingly enough, it seems that other spammers are freeriding this topic to infuse links to their own sites; for an example, check out this tweet (but don't follow the link). Yes, it's that bad: spammers are spamming other spammers. \n\n\nFinally, there's \"goodnight\". This topic is reaches trending topics almost every day, simply because somewhere around the world, people are always going to sleep. But is it useful? It's debatable. It is a legitimate topic and therefore there's nothing wrong with it trending, but since it's always there, one could argue that it's taking the place of other, perhaps more interesting topics. Twitter should seriously consider permanently banning certain words from the topics; but it opens a Pandora's box of possibilities; what if a movie called \"Goodnight\" comes out, and thus this topic suddenly becomes legit again?\nTwitter is becoming very big very fast, which is every company's dream come true, but it can also bring a lot of problems to the promising startup. Trending topics are becoming a very important part of the Twitter experience, and Twitter needs to find a way to deal with spam and fake accounts. \nOn one side, human conversations are fluid and ever-changing, but they also often fall into predictable patterns (goodnight). Figuring out the best possible way to deal with all the issues that Twitter is facing is going to be hard to solve algorithmically, and having editors constantly monitoring everything costs money and raises other issues, such as censorship. A combination of the two - seen in examples of other human-powered sites, such as Digg - is probably the best way to go, but Twitter needs to act fast, before it drowns in its own success."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2009/07/09/twitter-trends-trouble/>