Accidentally in Code

Tag: Trends

#unfollowdiddy

Earlier, I was trying to work out why “Amedisys” was trending (job postings! Crikey), and then people including it in their posts just to get their posts showing up on that trend. Does that work? Do people really follow people who just tweet all the currently trending topics periodically? One guy was trying to pimp out his facebook group follower scheme just including all the popular trending topics with a link to it. The group had 2 members.

And it reminded me of this article that I read this morning, analysising the #unfollowdiddy trend and concluding:

“…the most common reason for unfollowing Diddy was because others were doing so…”

Anyway, he thinks that period had zero effect on Diddy’s follower count. But I graphed the trending topic earlier and we can also graph follower counts, so I put them together below:

I’ve tried to line the graphs up so you can see if there’s any effect. Looks like the trend didn’t reduce his number of followers but the graph did plateau a little. So even if the trend didn’t have the effect it was advertising, and even if it’s not bad publicity, he wasn’t gaining any followers as a result of it.

Looking for this, I found myself at TweetStats. Diddy’s top 5 words are apparently: lets, people, rt, day, lol and the person he most commonly “rt’s” is himself. Hmm.

Twitter trending can be a great way to see what’s going on, what’s hot right now, what are people engaged in, what’s interesting… but there’s so much noise. It can hard to draw conclusions without looking at each trend individually. We know why iPhone is trending today, because the service pack is out etc – but do we need Twitter to tell us that? The blogosphere and the news are buzzing with it too. Weird, unexpected trends are much more interesting – and what I’m taking from this is that they don’t always mean what we think they do.

June 17, 2009
Wow

The US State Department confirmed that it intervened to keep Twitter going and downtime was recheduled to take place in the middle of the night in Iran, not in the US. The #IranElection hastag has been trending for days. See:

I saw this, and thought – wow. This is big big news on Twitter. Right now the number 2 trend is #haveyouever and it’s way below #IranElection. Gordon Brown, who was trending the other week can barely be seen. #followfriday, which once a week generates a load of spam is still below #IranElection. The #unfollowdiddy trend was really shortlived. People really care about this, if you search for Twitterers in Tehran, well you’ll find a whole lot more than you did last week. In order to confuse censors, people are changing their timezone and greening their picture in a show of support.

Then, I graphed this…

Well I guess we all have our priorities. Democracy – and people – may be dying in Iran… but at least we have the latest iPhone. The iPhone’s trend has this really sharp peak, but also is quite broad. It might not be number 1 right now, but the US is asleep. I really wouldn’t be surprised if that changed later today.

June 17, 2009
The Iranian Election is Trending
There’s a large Persian population in Ottawa, especially in Computer Science. So, a lot of my friends are from Iran and I follow the international news so I’ve been watching the election results with interest. One of my friends wasn’t going to vote, so the other day I was embroiled in an argument about that (it’s his responsibility to, don’t complain if you don’t vote) during which another (Iranian) friend declared that I should have his passport, which I found rather funny.

Anyway, living in the West where our media coverage is no doubt biased against Ahmadinejad (although comments like this speak for themselves) and all my Persian friends hate the guy with varying degrees of venom, I’m likely biased. None of them seem to buy the election results. The margin is unconvincing. I’m inclined to agree.

So, lets check the trending data. Note though – this is likely to be skewed in favor of Ahmadinejad because he’s the current President.

I’m going to start with Twitter this time. You can see the graph from Twist below:

This is interesting, because it’s actually Ahmadinejad that was more popular – I expected the opposite as Twitter likely has a more educated, liberal population. Although it looks like Mousavi has been more popular since the results came out – they’ve even been using Twitter to organize protests.

Blog Trends are below:

Not much to say here, but we can see the curves follow each other from around June 2nd, likely the election boost – but – Ahmadinejad is ahead of Mousavi.

Finally, Google Trends. This is more interesting, I think. Below is the graph:

Underneath the chart we can see where most of the traffic comes from, unsurprisingly it’s most from Iran (particuarly Tehran), in English and Persian.

So if we look just for Iran:

This is interesting – because it’s so close. It’s a shame that the graph just stops because it doesn’t show what’s the case right before the election but on the face of this it’s hard to beleive the announced result.

However, if we look at the breakdown:

Mousavi is only winning out in English, Ahmadinejad is doing better overall, in Tehran, and in Persian.

Given that Facebook was temporarily blocked in the run up to the election, I would love to see the trending data there.

So – hard to draw conclusions. At the end of this, I still don’t really beleive that Ahmadinejad won by that margin – although ahead in trending stats I don’t think more than would anyway be biased towards a sitting president. I’m not saying he couldn’t have won fairly (in which case, any perceived tampering can only be bad for him), but the margin is just huge. But the real tragedy is how may of the Iranian people don’t beleive that democracy has played it’s course. Can that ever have a good outcome?

Update: Mashable has a good article on how social media can help you track what’s going on with the Iranian election here.

Update: Protesting by crashing websites. http://www.pagereboot.com/ will let you put in a URL and auto-refresh it. Not advocating this, but if you wanted to participate some URLS are…
- http://www.ahmadinejad.ir/
- http://www.farsnews.com/
- http://www.leader.ir/
- http://www.moi.ir/
- http://www.shora-gc.ir/
- http://www.irna.ir/
Update: Website crashing is slowing all traffic in Iran, causing problems. People listing useful ways to help are Green Revolution and apparently also this one which has been taken down, hopefully will be up again later.
June 14, 2009