Trending Topics on Twitter - What Do They Mean?
If you are a recent visitor to Twitter, you may have noticed along the side of the right side of the page a listing of "Trending Topics." These topics are the most mentioned words being posted by Twitter users over a certain time frame. Although controversial, this can be a good way to see which topics are hot and the listing is often seen as a prelude to what the mainstream news media will be covering.
In January 2009, when US Airways Flight 1549 crash landed into the Hudson river, the rise of this event in the trending topics alerted main stream news organizations that a major news event was unfolding.
In fact, Twitter users "broke" the story about 15 minutes before most news organizations alerted their visitors and readers about the crisis. As more and more Twitter users shared their experiences, or "re-tweeted" the posts to friends, the higher and higher the topic climbed on the list of trending topics on the twitter.com homepage. This rapid rise showed how many people on the street could quickly combine together virtually and "report" on a news situation.
Other sites like WhatTheTrend take trending topics one step further and explain the term and why it's trending. For instance, as you can see in the image below Garth Brooks is trending and WhatTheTrend explains that the reason is that: "Garth Brooks announced he is coming out of retirement and will perform in Las Vegas."
Some have asked the question, "How do topics really get on the list?" To investigate, some users have done experiments using tools that track the appearance of terms to see how frequently they've been mentioned in order to appear on the list. It may in fact vary from week to week, but at the time, it was approximately 20 mentions per minute.
But unfortunately for Twitter users, spammers have found out that getting their terms on the list can be good for business. In order to keep the list from getting polluted with spam, the team at Twitter is constantly trying new ways to effectively ensure that the flow of information reflects what actual users are posting.
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