Twitter has announced - to much fanfare and discussion - that it wants to build a reputation ranking system for its users in order to bring more credibility to its trend and search tools.    In fact, Twitter trending has been one of the hottest topics on - Twitter.   Having thought a lot about how to measure reputation and extract trends from social media, we  wondered how Twitter planned to do this given their terse, unstructured activity streams.   

Issues of users gaming the system aside (which we’ll address in a later post), 140 characters, no tweet categorization other than voluntary hashtags, and no community feedback (e.g. voting) on tweets doesn’t leave much to work with.    To add a trustworthy reputation ranking system to the existing service, Twitter will likely have to introduce more structure and categorization in tweets.   This will force users to work harder, and will almost certainly impact the fast, free-form ethos that now characterizes Twitter.  ...