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Following the confusion caused by WikiLeaks failing to become a trending topic on Twitter as was expected last week, Twitter has put out an explanation of how their Trends algorithm actually works. The idea of Trends is to highlight topics of conversation that experience rapid growth in popularity at that time. If something is popular for a long time it gives it a pretty high baseline level, meaning that the change that's required to actually make it trend would be quite large. That means that often widely discussed topics like WikiLeaks don't trend, simply because they were widely talked about on Twitter before, and haven't seen a big enough increase in conversations across Twitter to get picked up by the Trends algorithm. Fairly simple really, but it points out that trending topics aren't necessarily the most popular overall, but have shown the biggest spike in popularity at that time.
Tags: social networking, SocialNetworking, Trends, Twitter, Web, WikiLeaks
source: Twitter