What Is Your Tweet Worth? Twitter Will Soon Decide

If you search for a hashtag or name on Twitter’s search feature, it’s likely that you’ve already run into the “Top Tweets” road block when trying to track the success of a campaign (or even just find out what everyone is talking about!). But now Twitter is taking that further and assigning tweets a “value.”

What does that mean? Well, starting tomorrow (says Mashable) Twitter will be rolling out this change.

How exactly tweets will be ranked is not entirely clear, but Roomann-Kurrik says “medium” — and, later — “high” value posts will be roughly analogous to the “Top Tweets” results you get when you search a word or hashtag on Twitter.com. That likely indicates tweets drawing high engagement or coming from users with large followings.

Boiled down, the idea is to make Twitter’s streaming API more useful for developers, who can tweak applications to specify what types of tweets they would like surfaced on a given subject or subjects.

Twitter posted about it at their blog, but the language is pretty specific to developers.

The new streaming-only filter_level attribute is intended for applications which display a selection of Tweets from a stream. Its values may be one of “none“, “low“, or “medium“, with a reserved “high” classification for future use. The “medium” (and eventually “high“) entries will roughly correlate to the “Top Tweets” results for searches on twitter.com. This will allow applications to more easily surface certain types of content from otherwise noisy or high-volume feeds.

What do you think? Is this a good thing, or is it a weird thing to judge a tweet? Post your thoughts in the comments!