J.D. tells us where we can find the trendiest trends and a tanned, rested and ready Kaiser has confession to make. In the news, tech sites get foolish on the first day of April; Facebook buys Oculus Rift and breaks the heart of millions of gamers; Apple appears to be almost ready to crank out the iPhone 6; the FCC frees up even more radio frequencies; Stephen Colbert catches all kinds of heat; and settlement checks and credits from the e-book pricing case have begun making their way to customers.
Tag Archives: trends
(Hopefully) Helpful Hint: What’s Going On?
News and gossip have been binding people together for centuries and the rise of the Internet has only made it more convenient to keep up with what everybody else is talking about. From social media to search engines, it’s easy to see what’s setting the world abuzz on any given day.
For example, Twitter users can search hashtags or keep an eye on the trending topics list within the service. Likewise, Facebook officially added a Trending topics list to its News Feed page earlier this year, which clickable links to go read about Gwyneth Paltrow’s marital state or The Walking Dead season finale.
Geeks all know we can go to Techmeme.com to see the technology news neatly aggregating all in one place, but what about the work beyond tech? Microsoft’s Bing search engine has also gotten into the act, nicking a Trends list from Twitter and Facebook and Yahoo News has a Trending Now blog. It makes sense for search engines to know what’s trending, since people are using them to look up and follow the news.
But if there’s any company that’s devoted server space to trending topics, it’s Google. The Big G has a dedicated Trends page and its Zeitgeist list of what people searched for each year. The company also offers in-depth looks at topics like March Madness or global interest in Game of Thrones or the Harry Potter series, and even a downloadable screensaver showing real-time searches in the United States. Suffice it to say, Google knows how to keep an eye on these things and is probably already working on an algorithm to detect trends within trends.
Episode 56: Proudly Flying Our Geek Flag
This week El Kaiser wrestles with an identity crisis and J.D. gives us the lowdown on how the micro-blogging service Twitter determines what is trending. In the news, taking down websites that offer access to pirated content by targeting their wallet; the NSA gets sued; Buzzfeed and Facebook have a slap fight; manufacturers ditch the Thunderbolt port; rumors heat up about a Microsoft smartwatch; Blackberry drastically drops the price on its flagship Z10 smartphone and Nasa discovers a new moon orbiting Neptune.
#TrendsOnTwitter
If you were anywhere near the bird-themed microblogging service last Thursday, you may have seen people tweeting about something called Sharknado. This campy mashup of marine-predator-meets-weather-disaster horror film was even announced as “trending on Twitter” Thursday evening.
This trend blip led a number of news organizations to take a closer look at the tweeting about the movie. The SocialGuide site, part of the Nielsen company, reported that Sharknado was the most discussed program on the air that night and generated more than 400,000 tweets, (even though the TV ratings urned out to be eh, not so much). But Sharknado made its mark on the trend lists and Twitter itself even blogged about the event.
So if you’re just a casual Twitter user, all of this trend business may seem a little confusing. How does a trend start? How do they count them? Is this just an advertising stunt?
Rest assured, trends are an official part of the Twitter service. In fact, when you’re logged into your account in the Web, you can see a little box of trends on the left side of the page and when you’re on the official mobile app, tap Discover then on Trends. There. You’ll see a list of keywords and hashtagged phrases. You’ll also see Promoted Trends, which are labeled as such and yes, those are advertising someone paid for. So, how did theses trends get there?
According to Twitter:
Trends are determined by an algorithm and are tailored for you based on who you follow and your location. This algorithm identifies topics that are immediately popular, rather than topics that have been popular for a while or on a daily basis, to help you discover the hottest emerging topics of discussion on Twitter that matter most to you. You can choose to see Trends that are not tailored for you by selecting a specific Trends location on Twitter.com.
So if you follow a lot of sports feeds, you’ll most likely see trending topics on that subject, like recent NBA trades if you have a team in your city. Hashtags are used in phrases, like #royalbaby to make the topics findable for people looking to search out all the tweets on the topic using that same hashtag. Trends also show world and local events.
If you want to see trends for other cities or parts of the world, click the Change link in the Twitter trends box to pick a different country or city and see what’s trending there. You can also type in “Worldwide” to get the global pulse.
When you click on a trend listed in the box, Twitter takes you to a page of search results for tweets using those keywords, phrase or hashtag. If you’re feeling like group activity, you can join in the trend by tweeting a new post of your own using the same keyboards or hashtag.
To avoid people gaming the system or trying to artificially inflate the importance of a topic, Twitter does have rules about trends, along with general rules for using the service.
As you can imagine, people love to see that topics are trending nationally or globally, and plenty of third-party sites that round up this info and present it in some sort of graphically pleasing form are out there. These include:
- What The Trend, a site owned by the social-media company HootSuite. The What the Trend page displays a list of Now Trending and All Trends Today, plus a handy list of top trends by country. There’s also a What the Trend Top Ten page and HootSuite’s Twitter Trends of the Week.
- The Hashtags.org site has page called Trending on Twitter that looks at the hot hashtags of the moment.
- Trendsmap, a geographical real-time representation of what the popular topics around certain parts of the world. You can sign in to Trendsmap with your Twitter account as long as you’re doing it for personal, non-profit and research use only. Otherwise, you can sign up for Trendsmap Plus at $19 a month to get ad-free data you can filter by hashtag, keywords or users, faster updates and Vine videos.
If you’re a marketing or advertising person, you can also find paid services for analyzing Twitter traffic for your business.
And if you missed the original airing of Sharknado, Syfy is rerunning it this Thursday at 7:00 p.m. Eastern time. You can find clips from the film around the Web (spoilers, darling!) if you don’t want to sit through two hours of giant toothy wind-propelled fish chomping their way through L.A. But then again, maybe you do.