A bit off topic but I’ve been thinking about Twitter Trends recently and today’s developments compelled me to post. If you’re a regular tweeter then you’ll know what I’m on about but if not then excuse this crude explanation…
Twitter Trends are the topics most talked about on Twitter. It’s easy to search tweets by these trends, either on Twitter’s main site or via third party apps. They are usually prefixed by a hashtag e.g. #SwineFlu
This has many implications for tweeting, most positive. For instance, mentioning current trends in your tweets can be a good way to generate extra traffic. Today though, things have taken an interesting twist…
#twitterpornnames (and various similar incarnations) have been sitting atop the trending pile for much of the day, and hundreds of people have willingly joined in, tweeting mother’s maiden names, pet names and street names!
Many quickly hailed this as a scam, designed to extract information commonly used as bank or other passwords. PC World has even released an article warning of the danger! If you’ve already posted you can delete your tweet via twitter.
