I know, I know. You’ve already read my thoughts about this before. Old hat. Anyway…

Imagine you’re at a bar or party of some sort. You don’t know anyone there, but you went to make new friends. You hear lots of conversations going on, ranging in topics. People are talking about a sporting event, a famous musician, a hot new electronics gadget, and whatever hot TV show was on last night. Naturally, you’ll gravitate toward the conversation that interests you, whatever it may be.

For some people, that might be the sporting event going on. And there might be a lot of people that find that particular topic interesting. But maybe not you. Maybe the musician topic doesn’t suit you either, even though they’re popular, it’s not your kind of music. And the hot TV show is something you used to watch, but it got super lame and you don’t wanna talk about it anymore. Maybe you’re like me, and you want to hear what people have to say about a revolutionary, magical device that was just released to the hands of the public. In that case, that’s where you wanna go. That’s the people you want to talk to.

It might be one of the smaller groups of people talking, but that’s okay, because you’re likely to find some friends here who like the same things as you. This isn’t to say you wouldn’t make friends over in the other conversations, but you’re probably more likely to find friends here, because you can contribute to the conversation and feel engaged about the topic.

Twitter currently handles Trending Topics as the most popular topics worldwide (and also in certain cities). While knowing what everyone in the world (or certain large cities) are talking about is somewhat valuable, it’s not always what you’re interested in. The topics might be interesting for a lot of people, but certainly not everyone. And even if you like one of the hot topics, you’re not necessarily interested in all of them.

Wouldn’t it be great™ if you could walk into a party of unfamiliar faces and everyone was talking about stuff you liked instead of a party where no one is talking about anything you like? You’d have a pretty good chance of finding new people who share the same interests. You’d engage in more conversation and make friends.

With the Internets (well, Twitter), we could experience this. Trending Topics, in my opinion, could be insanely more valuable to the individual person instead of assuming that everyone is interested in the most popular topics.

Considering the people you follow, Twitter could aggregate the topics from those tweets and generate a list of topics that interest you. If a lot of people in the world are talking about the World Cup and that doesn’t interest me, that’s okay, because the people I’m following are tweeting about the new iPhone or Pixar’s latest movie. Because the information regarding topics could be taken from people I follow, I could find new people who are talking about the things I like to hear about.