Tweet
This year Twitter released a year-end list of top trends for 2010, much as search engines like Google and Bing release their top queries. But it's a little different here. Given Twitter's status as a chattery network of rapid-fire conversations, breaking news stories and pop culture--including, notably, pop-culture phenomena with small and devoted cult followings--dominate the list, called "Hindsight." The algorithm for calculating top trends favors "novelty over popularity," meaning that a sudden and unexpected spike like the death of a C-list celebrity may ultimately outrank an ongoing major news story.
But in the rankings there's also insight into Twitter's own strategy and how some of the products and partnerships it's developed can affect, if not completely alter conversations across the service. A handful of the trends appearing in Hindsight 2010 were also "promoted" trends, a part of the advertising program that Twitter began to roll out this spring, and at least one was the result of an official media partnership with Twitter.
If you look at Twitter's list of movie-related trends for 2010, for example, at least two of them ("Scott Pilgrim vs. the World" and "Despicable Me"), were promoted at their release with campaigns to purchase trends on Twitter. Given their follow-it-live nature, entertainment awards shows were naturally dominant on the TV trends list. But the top spot goes not to the Oscars or the Grammys, but to the MTV Video Music Awards, which created an official "Twitter Tracker" app in conjunction with the service to spur more discussion.
Of course, the majority of entries on Twitter's Hindsight rankings were what you'd expect them to be--news events that spurred discussion on a broad, global scale. The summer's World Cup soccer tournament in South Africa was big ("vuvuzela" was the fifth most popular trend overall), as were large-scale disasters like the earthquake in Haiti and the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Oh, and then there's pop singer Justin Bieber, something that seems to have taken Twitter completely by surprise.
The point, though, is that Twitter's year-end list seems to prove the potential for manipulating mass conversations--both on behalf of advertisers and more impromptu viral campaigns--just as much as it proves that Twitter itself has moved far beyond that service that would crash during every Steve Jobs keynote. So maybe this dilutes the "authenticity" of what's getting talked about on Twitter. It also, quite likely, hints that its fledgling business model has potential.
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But in the rankings there's also insight into Twitter's own strategy and how some of the products and partnerships it's developed can affect, if not completely alter conversations across the service. A handful of the trends appearing in Hindsight 2010 were also "promoted" trends, a part of the advertising program that Twitter began to roll out this spring, and at least one was the result of an official media partnership with Twitter.
If you look at Twitter's list of movie-related trends for 2010, for example, at least two of them ("Scott Pilgrim vs. the World" and "Despicable Me"), were promoted at their release with campaigns to purchase trends on Twitter. Given their follow-it-live nature, entertainment awards shows were naturally dominant on the TV trends list. But the top spot goes not to the Oscars or the Grammys, but to the MTV Video Music Awards, which created an official "Twitter Tracker" app in conjunction with the service to spur more discussion.
Of course, the majority of entries on Twitter's Hindsight rankings were what you'd expect them to be--news events that spurred discussion on a broad, global scale. The summer's World Cup soccer tournament in South Africa was big ("vuvuzela" was the fifth most popular trend overall), as were large-scale disasters like the earthquake in Haiti and the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Oh, and then there's pop singer Justin Bieber, something that seems to have taken Twitter completely by surprise.
The point, though, is that Twitter's year-end list seems to prove the potential for manipulating mass conversations--both on behalf of advertisers and more impromptu viral campaigns--just as much as it proves that Twitter itself has moved far beyond that service that would crash during every Steve Jobs keynote. So maybe this dilutes the "authenticity" of what's getting talked about on Twitter. It also, quite likely, hints that its fledgling business model has potential.
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