Twitter Revolution 2009
December 29th, 2009
Portia Krebs
When Iran’s 2009 presidential election results were called into contention, Twitter played a pivotal role in the opposition’s efforts. As the government sought to close off many communications channels, Twitter remained a key tool for journalists and protesters alike. In fact, the technology was viewed as so important that the U.S. State Department asked Twitter to delay a regularly scheduled maintenance in order to keep communications flowing. In addition to demonstrating the micro-blogging phenomenon’s potential to promote democratic discourse, the Iran elections took the top spot for news topics over Twitter in 2009.
What were other top Twitter topics this year? According to Twitter, pop icon Michael Jackson was the most tweeted about person, followed by Susan Boyle and American Idol’s Adam Lambert. In the news events category “swine flu” and “Gaza” played second and third to Iran in tweeted topics. And fantasy and science fiction movies filled the top slots with “Harry Potter” winning the most tweets followed by “New Moon” and “District 9.” In the sports category, the “Super Bowl,” the “Lakers” and “Wimbledon” were the top three, with Tiger Woods ranking number eight on Twitter’s most-tweeted about people list.
Yet, even though these top Twitter topics seem plenty trendy, a Washington Post article reports that Twitter searches hardly reflect the zeitgeist. The piece reports research by Yahoo Boss Engineer Vik Singh who found that a mere 2 percent of all Tweets match trending search terms. The story contends that until Twitter itself becomes mainstream it may not be an accurate mirror of the top themes capturing our attention.
But regardless of Twitter’s accuracy as a trend barometer, the technology has proved to be a useful communications tool that found a role this year as a voice of democracy. And that’s technology over broadband we can all celebrate.
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