Tracking trends on twitter
The influence of twitter has been widely debated in the last couple of weeks. Trafigura's super-injunction on the Guardian was lifted after editor Alan Rusbridger's tweets about the restrictions were re-tweeted on mass. Users then united in disgust at Jan Moir's Daily Mail article about the death of Stephen Gately, leading to record complaints to the Press Complaints Commission. While it is debatable how events would have panned out without twitter, it must be agreed that the speed and size of the reaction to the Trafigura and Moir cases must be attributed to the site.
This week it was the turn of Nick Griffin's appearance on Question Time to become the hot-topic of twitter, with over a thousand tweets a minute using the #bbcqt hash tag during the programme. Between 11 and 12 on Thursday night 4.8% of all tweets mentioned #bbcqt.
There are several websites that are useful when tracking the most popular topics on twitter. Below are a few that I have tried out. Other useful sites can be found in this article on Mashable, which includes a list of iPhone applications for tracking trends.
What the trend? explains in a concise summary why a word or phrase is on the top trends list. Its explanations have started to be used on the main twitter site for some trending topics. It is a quick tool to find out why certain words are popular on twitter at a particular time.
monitter allows you to track tweets in real time. You choose which keywords you want to monitor and then the site displays the most recent tweets using those words, automatically refreshing. You can simultaneously follow several keywords on different columns, the number of which you can increase and decrease. It is particularly useful when following tweets of live events.
Trendistic provides graphs that show the popularity of keywords over a day, week or month. The charts allow you to see when trends started and how they develop showing the percentage of all tweets which mention particular words each day or each hour.
If you search 'Moir' on 16 October, you can see the growth of the tweeting about Jan Moir's Stephen Gately article through the day. There were boosts after popular twitter users Charlie Brooker, Derren Brown and Stephen Fry started to mention the controversial article at 11:42am, 12:05pm and 12:27pm respectively. However, the charts show that the article had started to become high-profile even before the big-guns started to tweet. 'Moir' was used in 0.19% of tweets between 10 and 11, increased to 0.41% in the hour in which Brooker tweets and then peaked at 0.61% in the hour that Fry and Brown first mentioned Moir. Between 4 and 5pm, 0.23% of all tweets mentioned 'StephenFry'.
Trendistic is also useful for seeing how trends, for topics such as swine flu, change over the long-term.
Trendistic graph showing the percentage of all tweets on twitter including the word 'Moir' on 16 October
On trend, off topic
When you first join twitter it can seem like it is just Facebook but with only statuses. That is what I thought when I signed up, but then I discovered trending and search and realised how it could actually be a useful tool for journalists.
However as good as they can be, there are somethings for which searches do not work. Yesterday The Times' Joanna Geary tweeted, "Oh good grief! Any tips on how to search and filter for news stories about automotive brand Seat?#namesthatdon'tworkontheweb."
I think she was talking about searching on the web generally, but it raises the issue of how not everything is easy to find on twitter. Words like Seat are confusable and it's therefore hard to find the tweets which relate to the meaning you want, eg. the brand Seat, rather than just seats.
It is not just confusable words which are hard to find. When people tweet, with only a few exceptions, people do not generally use the 140 characters to include every keyword and tag their tweet relates to. For example, if I'm tweeting about something that happens outside my flat, I usually say 'outside my flat' rather than including the GPS co-ordinates, postcode, ward, borough, county, region, country and continent of my house. So if you were searching for things happening in my area, it's likely it might not come up in any searches.
To some extent I think it provides some relief that twitter does have imperfections which stop it being completely Orwellian. Nevertheless which websites do you find helpful in searching tweets for stories? I'm trying out TwitterLocal, which allows you to find tweets coming from a specific area, I will let you know how I get on.
