Unlike you, I’d rather have an area of Twitter where I can see more Trending Topics, not less.  Let me plow through the long tail to my heart’s content.

I think we agree here, and we’re both trying to find interesting things. Again, my point is just that the top layer aren’t interesting. Like most makers, we like to drill down into data porn. They don’t let you.

Of course, they should open it up to an API, and let others figure out the trending list that might be interesting. P( click-on-trend | all previous tweeted trends ) can’t possibly be that hard to compute.

Farmville:

I guess we can agree to disagree on your first point.  People love to talk about FB application growth, but the dirty secret is the half-life of application usage how many orphaned applications people have in their profile.

App counts are openly measured by active users - the stat that all services should use. There seem to be a few apps that stick despite the clones, e.g. friends for sale and mafia wars.

Also, doesn’t this pattern match a lot of other platforms, like the iPhone App Store? Big burst, some level of sustained sales, but largely just the big blip.

Say what you want about Twitter, but the attrition rate there in terms of orphaned accounts is very auditable, probably as it’s not connected to any revenue generating activity (yet).  The numbers for Farmville are ridiculous, as in laughable, because there’s not way to audit their validity or see the complete usage picture.  Hence, making any comparison of Farmville to Twitter is specious at best.

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My issue remains that transparency would do FB well for 3rd party validation of their numbers - how they do this and still champion user privacy will be interesting.

Whose numbers do you trust about Twitter? Comscore? Nielson? They don’t even talk about stats of their apps, too. Might I point out TwitPic, the once golden child, now at great risk of getting crushed. (thought that is largely because it wasn’t fast enough at times, and had some bad downtime)

I find it far more likely for Twitter to under deliver on their current valuation than Zynga.

But indeed, it is a very exciting time.