If you tweet about what you're eating for breakfast, a famous punch-line for the social networking site, that's got to be considered low value -- right?
Don't let it bother you too much, but Twitter is going to start publicly assessing the value of each tweet.
In a blog post about metadata changes to its API, the company notes that tweets will be considered "low," "medium" or "high" value. An alternate value of "none" may also appear in the metadata, perhaps for spam or something that makes no sense at all.
The value will be assigned under "filter_level" in its API. That means developers can tap into the change to surface more relevant tweets in third-party apps. For instance, it could display "Top Tweets" for a given search phrase.
While Twitter doesn't share how a tweet is ranked by the new algorithm, The Next Web speculates that "shares, views, engagement numbers and so forth" will be factors. It's likely that the popularity of a user could also be taken into account, so tweets from someone like Justin Bieber may be deemed high value (for better or worse).
The announcement prompted one media observer Jeff Jarvis to ask the following question.
That's exactly right, says The Verge's Jeff Blagdon, writing, "The move is particularly significant for being the first time Twitter is making its own value judgments on tweet quality so explicitly public."
The metadata change is expected to go live on Wednesday, Feb. 20, per Twitter Developer Advocate Arne Roomann-Kurrik.