A playful hashtag, #beingmallu was trending on twitter for a full day, starting 1 PM on 09-Jan-2012. Thanks to all the mallus worldwide, #beingmallu was trending globally. Yes, globally. I too chipped in. There are a few good posts on the trend.
This tag had me thinking. If a few earnest Malayalis could influence the global twitter trends atleast when the Americans are sleeping, is it a reliable indication of the trends worldwide? I guess a rudimentary analysis is in order. Let's examine.
One might think that the tag was trending due to the large number of educated mallus worldwide, what with the 100% literacy and all. Oh yes, among these is a huge percentage with access to the internet - for example the large number of practically jobless Software Engineers Kerala has exported (Exhibit A - me). Could be. Or, it could be also be due to the fact that a few hyperactive handles did most of the tweeting. There is nothing wrong with this, of course. From my basic analysis of various twitter handles, one thing that I have understood is that unless the person behind the handle is a celebrity (or fast becoming one), regularity of tweets and piggybacking to popular issues are the only ways to gain more retweets and followers. This really is a chicken and egg situation, a non-celebrity has no choice but to keep tweeting about the issue of the day to gain further audience. Yes, kinda like politics. Of course the tweets have to be either useful, funny or ideological. Once the hashtag reached the top spot in India, it truly reached the tipping point. It woke several sleeping handles up. For instance, I could see several #beingmallu tweets per second by 5 PM. This should have resulted in the hashtag staying at the top globally, despite the peak activity time of the Brits (assuming they are the lot who tweet in English the most, after the Americans).
Still... Does it mean that twitter trends mean people are genuinely interested? What could be a better indicator? Who else has better idea of what's happening around us? Of course, it's Google. I firmly believe that the Google trends is a better indicator of the national interest than the twitter trends. Google trends clearly provide us a better picture of all and sundry things that people search in Google. Twitter adoption in India is still low. Hence, the twitter trends can be influenced by a few hyperactive tweeps. Google is far more popular and the base is huge. As a result, Google trends cannot be influenced that easily. On any day, I would rely on Google trends to know the mood of the nation.
PS1 : There is copycat #beingKannadiga trending now. What? #beingMallu is a plagiarised version of #beingGujju ? Imbossible!
PS2: All the above statements are based on just observations and here say. So all of them could be absolute rubbish.
PS3: Shameless plug of my tweet.
#BeingMallu is when you can correctly spell Thiruvananthapuram, correctly name Kochi and correctly say Kozhikode.
— Aravind Naick (@aravindgn) January 9, 2012
