Trending Topics. Fun but fishy. But first, some background:
When people ask me what I majored in in college, I always say "Cinema and Media Studies," or "Film Studies," depending on how loud the room is. What I almost never say is "I also came really close to double-majoring in film and psychology, but I decided in my last semester that I didn't care about completing the second major." I don't say that, but it is a fact. I took a LOT of psychology courses in college.
Even though my psych studies aren't a part of my one-paragraph bio anymore, I'm glad I took those courses. One of the most valuable things I learned in my studies was about statistics. Namely, that they are dubious. Professional articles detail the studies that create statistics, and these articles are, at best, verbose about sample sizes, statistical significance, etc. But the statistics that trickle down into political talking points and newspaper headlines are often uncited, biased, or just plain confounding (sorry, statistics pun).
So, now to Twitter. On the sidebar of everyone's twitter homepage, there is a lovely list of things that are being most frequently uttered on the service. It's automatically generated, and is fun to take a glance at. Should you ever click on one of these words or phrases, you'll see the most recent tweets that contain them. And you'll likely see a problem with the whole Trending Topics enterprise.
Some users are simply obsessed with Trending Topics. So while millions of people are tweeting about their excitement over the New Moon soundtrack's early release, a million more (give or take) are tweeting about how psyched they are that "New Moon" is trending. There are users at this very moment having a ball by combining as many Trending Topics into one post as they can. Why? I can't begin to fathom.
At the time of this writing, "Remotely start your" is trending because of a highly re-tweeted Mashable article called "Want to remotely start your car...there's an app for that". Tons of Trending-Topic junkies saw the phrase, and are riffing on it by tweeting "remotely start your life," or "remotely start your Christmas Shopping." That latter example was tweeted by WithLoveGifts, an online store selling gifts (like "an acre of land on the moon") to people in the UK. Trending Topics as marketing strategy? Clever indeed.
Clever and fishy.
