Agreed. Twitter is completely inundated with spam and I consider trending topics to generally be among the worst examples of human expression, and yet I love twitter and use it constantly because I only see updates from people I follow.
google's "social" search results don't show up that often for me, but when they do, the little icon and note that says "so-and-so has shared this link" make me look at that link first because a) google has matched it to my query and b) so-and-so liked it enough to share it on twitter (and +1 now? not sure if it's working yet).
This mostly works for me for searches about programming, since that is the community I follow on twitter, but it does a great job of separating wheat from chaff and helping me stumble upon related cool things. Hopefully they don't screw this up and I can get similar benefits for other topics/related communities.
google's "social" search results don't show up that often for me, but when they do, the little icon and note that says "so-and-so has shared this link" make me look at that link first because a) google has matched it to my query and b) so-and-so liked it enough to share it on twitter (and +1 now? not sure if it's working yet).
This mostly works for me for searches about programming, since that is the community I follow on twitter, but it does a great job of separating wheat from chaff and helping me stumble upon related cool things. Hopefully they don't screw this up and I can get similar benefits for other topics/related communities.