Micro blogging Web site Twitter reported close to 25 billion “tweets” posted during 2010, with an average of approximately 95 million tweets per day. Twitter has analysed all those tweets to identify the year's top 10 trends.
These include leading trends in eight categories: News Events, People, Movies, Television, Technology, World Cup, Sports and Hashtags. Each trend in the top 10 list includes multiple related terms, to give the most accurate view of the topics that people cared about most in 2010.
Topping the list this year was the devastating Gulf Oil spill, while the Fifa 2010 Soccer World Cup placed second. SA's vuvuzela was also a popular trending topic, ranking fifth and even topping Apple's iPad in popularity.
Twitter first introduced “Twitter Trends” two years ago. The feature is designed to help Twitter subscribers discover the “most breaking” breaking news from across the world, in real-time.
“We track the volume of terms mentioned on Twitter on an ongoing basis. Topics break into the trends list when the volume of tweets about that topic at a given moment dramatically increases,” explains the company blog.
“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.”
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