Twitter to Clean Up Trending Topic Searches – Is This that Reputation Thing?

On Twitter’s blog, they announced an initiative to clean up the spammy tweets that often appear for trending topics. As described from the post:

Today we’re starting to experiment with improvements to trends that will help you find more relevant tweets. Specifically, we’re working to show higher quality results for trend queries by returning tweets that are more useful.

MG Siegler over on Techcrunch and Jolie O’Dell of ReadWriteWeb wonder how this will be accomplished. My guess? Twitter is starting some sort of reputation score for accounts. The lowest-of-the-low accounts in terms of reputation will get shunted aside.

For background on this reputation thing, see a couple earlier posts on this subject:

• How Should Tweets Be Ranked in Search Engine Results?
• How User Reputation Scores Will Change Twitter

Included in that second link is this quote from a Rafe Needleman post in May 2009:

Twitter Search will also get a “reputation” ranking system soon, Jayaram told me. When you do a search on a “trending” topic–a topic that is so big it gets its own link in the Twitter.com sidebar–Twitter will take into account the reputation of the person who wrote each tweet and rank the search results in part based on that.

Curious to see how this one plays out.