By A Bisht and Mani Raj
A couple of days ago, we introduced you to a site which helps you make sense of the Twitter microsyntax. In the said article, there's a short explanation of the relevance of # tag prefixed before a tweet.
Here is it:
# for showing your tweet or retweet in searches for the specific topics. If you want your tweet to appear in the search results related to your tweet content, then prefix your tweet with a #.
For example, if someone tweets something related to his or her dog, and intends that tweet to appear in the search results for 'pets' then he or she will have to prefix #pets before the said tweet.
Nowadays millions of twitter users are using this #tag to include their tweets in the twitter search.
Majority of the tweets don't become a major trend at twitter search because people most of the time tweet about subjects appealing to a specific group of people. But still there are some topics that are talked about simultaneously by a bearshare of twitter users. The recent Swine flu outbreak was one such topic. A vast majority of twitter users shared tweets about the flu. As a monotonous act, majority included #swineflu in their tweets. In this case #swineflu became a trending topic at twitter space.
In addition, widely talked about and anticipated events/topics, like the US presidential election results, some revolutionary move by Google, or some major incident at any part of the globe, also make for a trend at Twitter and thus appear in the twitter search results.
Twitter picks up top ten of the topics most talked about at any given point of time at the twitter space and shows them under 'trending topics' on the right sidebar of the your twitter homepage.
As Twitter is run by twitter users, user tweets with # tags populate the trending topics list.
All said, not all of the trending topics on the list are that easy to comprehend like #swineflu, and it's a real effort to unearth what the trend name means and why it made to the top ten trending topics list. Like how will one make sense of #bea09.
In that situation, "What the trend.com" will help you understand what a particular trend name means and and why it made to the top trending topics list. It does that by means of a short and quick explanation of why it's trending. You can also see the latest tweets, Flickr photos and news stories.
To see how it works, click here.
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