Twitter and YouTube Dec. 15 offered their lists of hottest tweet topics and videos. Michael Jackson was popular on Twitter and YouTube, but similarities ended shortly after that. Twitter tabulated seven categories that people seemed to congregate around: news events, people, movies, TV shows, sports, technology and hash tags, those Twitter-specific signifiers to aggregate tweets users post around a specific topic. Susan Boyle blew up on YouTube, which also posted lists of fastest rising searches by month around the world and in the United States.
Two weeks after
Google, Yahoo and
Microsoft Bing unveiled their lists of top searches for 2010, Twitter and
YouTube followed suit, with their lists of hottest trends and most watched
videos, respectively.
For Twitter, the Iranian elections proved to be the
hottest topic, with users tweeting about the controversial elections en masse.
The terms
#iranelection, Iran and Tehran were all in the top 21 of Trending Topics, and
#iranelection finished in a close second behind t#musicmonday, Twitter Chief
Scientist Abdur Chowdury
said in a company blog post.
Twitter tabulated seven categories that people seemed to
congregate around: news events, people, movies, TV shows, sports, technology
and hash tags, those Twitter-specific signifiers to aggregate tweets
users post around a specific topic.
Leaders in those respective categories were the
aforementioned #iran election, Michael Jackson, who passed away in June, Harry
Potter, American Idol, Super Bowl, Google Wave, that quirky real-time
collaboration platform; and #musicmonday.
See Twitter's hot trends lists
here. Not surprisingly, some of these hot topics mirror popular results from the
major search engines. Michael Jackson led searches on Google, Yahoo and Bing
for 2009.
Google's YouTube video-sharing site meanwhile is a
user-generated video phenomenon like no other.
YouTube's most watched videos were:
Susan Boyle - Britain's Got Talent (120+ million views);
David After Dentist (37+ million views);
JK Wedding Entrance Dance (33+ million views); the
New Moon Movie Trailer (31+ million views); and
Evian Roller Babies (27+ million views).
YouTube also posted lists of fastest rising searches by
month around the world and in the U.S. See those complete lists
here.
In the U.S., Christian Bale captured watchers' interests
in February after a video
surfaced of him
pitching a fit on a film set. Michael Jackson's
Thriller video, a pop-music classic, dominated June, following his passing.
Paranormal Activity, a low-budget indie suspense film, captured peoples' minds
and eyes in October.
Two highly publicly figures sandwiched the year's most
popular video searches in the U.S. and abroad. U.S. President Barack Obama's inauguration
was the top searched video in the U.S. and worldwide in January, while Tiger
Woods' scandalous affairs caught everyone's attention in December.
What makes YouTube, well, YouTube is its adherence to
letting users broadcast themselves doing silly, fun, cool and
interesting
things on Webcams and handheld camera and uploading that content
online. But Google hasn't effectively made money from this content at a
rate commensurate with the billions of hours of video uploaded on the
site each
month.
Reuters
reported that Google is considering trying to get users to pay for
subscriptions, ideally to encourage more media companies to license premium TV
shows and movies to the popular online video site. This would help Google
compete with the wildly successful Hulu site, the NBC Universal, News
Corporation, and Disney video provider, which does offer such content.
But it would also chart an course that is as yet unknown
for YouTube: long-form, professional content for a fee. Will YouTube users pay
for such content? They do for Hulu, but is YouTube too late?
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