What's trending? Part 1

Tackling this weeks trending topics from Twitter.

Twitter has become my social network of choice over the past year and this week I finally found the words to explain why. It plays host to hot debate, topical news and major campaigning. I don’t want to know what you had for tea tonight and I’ve seen enough cute cat pictures to last a life time, this isn’t Facebook. I expect intelligent, funny, opinionated conversation and on Twitter I follow those that will supply me with exactly this.

One question I couldn’t answer though was who followed me? It dawned on me that my relationship with Twitter was rather one sided; I don’t always check who’s followed me so I don’t always follow back and only will if I’m genuinely interested. Yes, shame on me!

Anyway, it was time to take a closer look at my followers. They were as I thought; a good mix of business associates, old school friends, family and then I realised something... I’d attracted an unhealthy population of Justin Bieber fans. Why were they following me? The very fabric of my universe had changed.

Completely bewildered at this discovery I started reading the tweets of one of my followers, self-branded as ‘just another Belieber’. Adorning his name in love hearts every other tweet and even arguing with a fellow follower who ‘wasn’t doing hearts properly’, she really was a hardcore fan. How many more of these fanatics are there? 16,521,847 more, that’s how many. He’s currently racking up 60 new mentions per second on Twitter and that’s after the ‘Hairgate’ scandal.

Not familiar with ‘Hairgate’? Let’s take a look at a headline this time last year:

Bieber Loses 80,000 Twitter Fans After Haircut

It would seem his fans are quite opinionated obsessed about his hair, as well as the love hearts. At times it reaches an almost religious level of devotion, with darkened corners of the internet discussing whether or not he is now ‘bigger than Jesus’. I couldn’t quite bielieb what I was reading.

Feeling the need for some intelligent input I trawled the internet for a respectable and well reasoned opinion on this matter. I came across the FBI’s Director, Robert S. Mueller III; “Who the heck is this kid, and why can’t he get a haircut?”

For Robert S. Mueller III, Bieber Fever had gotten out of hand, and for a man responsible for crime investigations in the USA it’s easy to understand why. In an age when most teenage boys look like they’ve been set loose in Topman, collected their obligatory beige chinos and come out the other side with Bieber’s famous ‘do’, picking a culprit out of a line up is going to get tricky.

It would seem that the entire world has gone Justin Bieber mad and my disgruntled blogging will only be adding to the millions of hits on Google. On that note, this will be the last time I mention ‘The Bieber’ for the whole of 2012, call it a belated New Year’s Resolution. So from now on, much like Peter's denial of Jesus himself, I know nothing of the boy, nor his amazingly shiny hair.