Twitter top trends: Gulf oil spill trumps Justin Bieber
A football fan blows a vuvuzela horn. (Carl de Souza/AFP/Getty Image)
The year of 2010 saw Twitter, the five-year-old micro-blogging site, skyrocket into the national conversation. Although only six percent of Americans regularly use the site, it has pushed political campaigns forward, offered a megaphone for some users, provided platforms to groups such as WikiLeaks and followed the news and conversation of the day. The company just released its top Twitter trends of the year.
As the recent controversy over WikiLeaks not being a regular Twitter trend despite the large amount of conversation around the leaked cables, the trends do not rely solely on the amount of mentions a topic gets, but more on the frequency and variety of the mention.
So despite "Justin Bieber" traffic consuming 3 percent of Twitter's total servers, the pop sensation ranks only No. 8 in the top trends.
A few interesting take-aways: Apple dominates the technology conversation, with four top technology trends revolving around Apple products. We're decidedly disaster-prone, with the top news trends revolving around the natural disasters of the oil spill, the Haiti earthquake and the Pakistani floods. Chilean miners and WikiLeaks also saw a lot of Twitter action. Brazil has been one of the top adopters of Twitter, and the effect can be seen in the top people mentioned on Twitter. Coming in No. 2 is Dilma Rousseff, the Brazilian president-elect.
The list of top trends:
3. "Inception"
5. Vuvuzela
6. Apple iPad
9. "Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows"
10. Pulpo Paul
For the full category listings, go here.
By
Melissa Bell
| December 13, 2010; 11:28 AM ET
Categories:
The Daily Catch
Save & Share:
Previous: Gawker hacked; Twitter accounts affected
Next: Geminid meteor shower peaks Monday night -- best shower of the year
No comments have been posted to this entry.
We encourage users to analyze, comment on and even challenge washingtonpost.com's articles, blogs, reviews and multimedia features.
User reviews and comments that include profanity or personal attacks or other inappropriate comments or material will be removed from the site. Additionally, entries that are unsigned or contain "signatures" by someone other than the actual author will be removed. Finally, we will take steps to block users who violate any of our posting standards, terms of use or privacy policies or any other policies governing this site. Please review the full rules governing commentaries and discussions.