As a source of information, your everyday experience with Twitter probably consists of reading your friends’ incoming tweets, and perhaps occasionally tuning in to the public timeline to marvel at the confusion and sheer incomprehensibility of it all. Looking at Twitter tweet-by-tweet it all seems so random, like so many atoms whooshing by.
However, just as atoms have a genius for combining into tangible objects, so too does the tweetstream produce its own order out of chaos. I’m talking here about Twitter trends, those topics and ideas that suddenly, without anyone planning anything or controlling anything, seem to be on everyone’s Twitter lips.
Twitter itself mines the vast public database of tweets for interesting trends, and displays the top ten on the Twitter Search page ). Of course, Twitter programmers want in on this action, too, so there’s no shortage of tools that let you get a sense of the Twitter zeitgeist. Here are just a few to get you started:
1: Tweetmeme (www.tweetmeme.com). This site examines the links in the tweetstream and shows which ones have been tweeted most often (see figure 9.13).
2: Twist (http://twist.flaptor.com). You can use this site to see how often a particular topic has been mentioned on Twitter, and you can even compare two or more topics.
3: TwitScoop (www.twitscoop.com). This addictive site offers a Buzzing right now feature that shows the most popular Twitter topics in a cloud format, where the more popular a topic is, the larger and bolder its text (see figure 9.14). The addictiveness comes from the real-time display that shows topics growing and shrinking as you watch.
4: Twopular (http://twopular.com). This site shows you the trending Twitter topics in different timeframes: the past two hours, eight hours, day, week, month, and ever since the service began (in late 2008). One nice touch is the use of up, down, and sideways arrows to indicate a trend’s direction.
"Twitter Tips: Following Twitter trends"
Reference : wiley.com
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