Twitter trying to explain why Wikileaks
never trended:
Twitter Trends are automatically generated by an algorithm that attempts to identify topics that are being talked about more right now than they were previously. The Trends list is designed to help people discover the 'most breaking' breaking news from across the world, in real-time. The Trends list captures the hottest emerging topics, not just what’s most popular.
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Sometimes a topic doesn’t break into the Trends list because its popularity isn’t as widespread as people believe. And, sometimes, popular terms don’t make the Trends list because the velocity of conversation isn’t increasing quickly enough, relative to the baseline level of conversation happening on an average day; this is what happened with #wikileaks this week.
Far be it for me to suggest this may not be entirely true, but I have seen a conference topic trend more than once with just a few hundred people tweeting. I eagerly await the first analysis of the twitter traffic of #wikileaks vs some of the topics that did trend in over the last few days