ReadWriteWeb

When you think of Twitter and influence, you might think that the most obvious metric used to measure would be the number of followers a user has. Time and again, influence on Twitter has been shown to be not a direct function of how many followers one has, but a number of other factors.

One of those factors, according to a report by HP, may be just as obvious as follower numbers: long-standing status as a source of information and news. Having millions upon millions of followers may be fun, but it doesn't set the Trending Topics.

Multi-column, multi-platform social network client TweetDeck has issued an update that fixes a few bugs and adds "some small, but important, new features". We're talking support for Twitter's t.co URL shortener, uploading pics to Posterous and even sending out tweets that are longer than the 140 character limit.

The update is just for the standard desktop client, not the "super-swanky User Streams Preview version", but TweetDeck promises an upgrade for that is also on the way soon.

Updated: We've added a new chart at the bottom of the post.

Last month, Twitter started promoting ad keywords in its "trending topics" list. With this system, users are brought to a search results page, where the page is topped by a promoted Tweet. But does it work is the question.

The answer seems to be yes. Today the National Basketball Association purchased "LeBron James" as a trending topic. Discussion on Mr. James has increased markedly since then. Since the topic has been purchased it has gone from 500 Tweets per hour to 3,000 and rising.

While none of us here at ReadWriteWeb have yet to see it in our Google News, a tip this morning from blogger Joe Hobot tells us that trending topics may be coming to the search engine's news aggregator.

We got in touch with Google this morning and a spokesman confirmed that the feature is indeed part of a series of experiments the company has been running since early this month.

Image thanks to Joe Hobot.

Finally, the powers that be are planning to put a stop to #liesboystell, #goodhead, and... well, all the other asinine, vulgar, and generally pointless trending topics one finds in the right column of the Twitter web interface.

Over the summer, we noticed that Twitter was submerging some adult-themed trending topics, and we noted the absolute need for more top-down policing of the trends list, which should be available for surfacing interesting and timely items to engage users. Today, Twitter has finally acknowledged the brokenness of the feature and has stated its intentions to fix the issue.

Tonight, the bored and lonely segment of Twitter users banded together to push three sexy, raunchy, and totally inappropriate terms into the trending topics leaderboard.

Within minutes (as far as we could tell), both terms were removed from the list on the web interface at Twitter.com. However, they still showed up on third party services such as TwitScoop and Hashtags.org. We feel this blog's cachet and provenance do not allow for the repetition of such phrases, so you'll have to check out the screen shots below and gasp in mock horror along with us.