Twitter and the Gaza Flotilla
Above is a dynamically updated chart from Trendistic.com, a service that tracks trending topics on Twitter. It shows how much Twitter users have been using the hashtag #flotilla over the course of the past week, and naturally this includes a peak since this morning. According to Trendistic, #flotilla is one of the top trending topics at the moment, accounting 0.78% of tweets worldwide.
But you wouldn't know that from Twitter itself, which has #4wordsbeforedeath trending. It was popular last night, but as this time only accounts for 0.18% of tweets. So what gives?
There is some speculation that Twitter may be banning #flotilla from its trending calculations. Twitter can ban common words so as not to give false results. But #flotilla is hardly a common word. Last June, Twitter intervened (at the request of the State Dept.) to keep its servers going when #iranelection was trending. It was rightly applauded for doing so. So what's up with not allowing #flotilla to trend, and redirecting searches on the word to the homepage (just try it from your account.)
Update: There have been suggestions that Twitter's recently announced new rules on trending may be to blame. On Twitter's site, it says:
UPDATE: Recent Trending Topics Improvements
5/14/2010:
Twitter is about what is happening right now, and we have recently updated our trending topics algorithm to reflect this. The new algorithm identifies topics that are immediately popular, rather than topics that have been popular for a while or on a daily basis, to help people discover the "most breaking" news stories from across the world. (We had previously built in this 'emergent' algorithm for all local trends, described below.) We think that trending topics which capture the hottest emerging trends and topics of discussion on Twitter are the most interesting. While this is very much a work in progress, with this tweak we have taken a big step toward capturing how trends quickly emerge and grow on Twitter. We also think it's compelling to know what the "most popular" topics are, and we will look to capture this in some way in the future.
It is important to note that this new algorithm does not "block" any topics from trending. If topics you saw regularly in your Trending Topics menu have disappeared or are not showing as consistently as before, do a saved search for them on your homepage. That way, in one click, you can view search results for topics that matter most to you. Also consider localizing your Trending Topics menu, as shown below.
These changes do not really help explain why #flotilla is not being allowed to show as trending. First, it is a recently popular topic. Second, Twitter's website does not allow you to do a saved search for them — when you enter flotilla or #flotilla as a search term, it returns the full latest twitter feed, not tweets with these words. The system has clearly been set up to ignore "flotilla" both in trending and in search. I've asked Twitter for an explanation, which I'll post here if/when I receive it.
I should also note that #freedomflotilla is now trending.
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Issandr El Amrani
I'm getting reports that #flotilla is now trending, although having checked myself I still don't see it. However, both "Gaza flotilla" and #freedomflotilla are trending pretty high. The other thing is that doing a search on "flotilla" now works. It's still a mystery why it wasn't recognized earlier today.
Reader Comments (9)
I also get a "Something is technically wrong." page if I click on the Israil trending term. But not #4wordsbeforedeath or BBE TRICIA, whatever that is.
I honestly don't think there is anything political in this. They've tried to tidy up to prevent one topic dominating the trending topics - if they were trying to censor then it wouldn't make sense to leave "Gaza flotilla" trending.
Unfortunately it's a bit cack-handed, as any tweets only including "gaza" or "flotilla" but not both are being left out of the feed.
If anyone gets "something is technically wrong" it's most likely that the Twitter servers are struggling to cope with the volume of interest.
I would look at the number of spam robots that have attached themselves to the tags, No doubt they will be the cause of this issue.
@marcia maybe try a search for "Israel" instead?
@the pedant: the tag Israil was trending because that is Turkish for Israel
There has been no condemnation of this by US government and the Nobel peace prize winner Obama has not come out in public criticising Israel for this act of violence.
I think we made a big mistake here. What was the hurry in giving him the Nobel peace award. This is a real test of Omaba. If he really deserves this then he need to come out in public and openly criticise the violent act of Israel. If this does not happen then people all over the world should come out on the street demanding Obama to return back the Nobel Peace prize award.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOGG_osOoVg
Everybody knows that Turks are islamists ; historic enemy of Jews.Turkey in original name is ANATOLIA which is the Land of Jews . Either they go back to Mongolia or face the Nuclear missiles from Israel.