twitter vs the google zeitgeist
December 1st, 2009 • posts i've written
A recent article from Techcrunch shows that only 2% of tweets overlap with Google search trends.
His (Vik Singh) stats came from an analysis of 10 million Tweets he crawled last summer. He looked at all Tweets, not just trending topics. When he stripped out the non-essential words, he found that the average Tweet consists of 6.28 terms, or the equivalent of a really good search query. But there is not much overlap between what people are Tweeting about and what the general population is searching for. Maybe that is because people tend to search for what they don’t know, whereas they Tweet about what they do know or think they know. Or maybe it’s just because people on Twitter are not normal.
Why do tweets not match up to search queries? Because they’re entirely different tools, serving entirely different behaviors.
From studying Twitter for the last year or so, trending conversations on Twitter seem to fall into these categories:
- Rituals/Community Customs – these are events created or appropriated by the community, a sort of test of who’s hip and who’s not
- Media fandom – Twitter is full of conversations between fans of media properties (live-airings, debuts, and opening weekends are important to watch)
- Ongoing Events – users spread updates and continued news for very large-scale, if not global, events (ongoing news events can mature into adopted hash-tags)
- Breaking Events – these trending topics are short-lived and come together within one-to-two hours in most cases
As you can see, this is quite different from the kind of behavior that leads one to a Google search box. Twitter is a social tool (the more anonymous, the more its treated like a chat-room, I’ve found) and Google is a search tool. One provides a set of possible solutions to a defined problem, the other provides social interaction (among other things).
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I feel you on the *Don’t Know* vs *Do Know* piece but can you explain the first 2 categories a bit more? Seems much more nuanced than that.