How, Indonesia, Out-Trended, The, Oscars, Twitter

While I'm really not a fan of senselessly reporting what is trending on Twitter (see how the Independent is able to squeeze out a regular 'column') it is worth noting that (keyword) Indonesia out-trended the Oscars (which take place tonight) on Twitter today. The below data from Trendistic, a Twitter monitoring websites, shows the sheer number of Twitter users in Indonesia, and Jakarta in particular, which was crowned the the capital of Twitter in Asia (as blogged here) earlier this year. #Indonesia began trending after a number of music concerts were broadcast on national television, from here opportunistic twitter users began promoting the hashtag to make it trend, giving a little insight into the number of Indonesians on Twitter. How was it possible? So how did the buzz around a Southeast Asia country beat the talk about the planet's hottest film industry even? The truth is, the data does not prove Indonesia is/was more popular on Twitter as statistics can be used to stretch a point. 1. #Indonesia was trending while the US was asleep, a time when Indonesia Twitters make up a greater proportion of active users online, while the #Oscars trend is taken during the morning US-time...not peak time for Twitter in the US. With the US fully online one would expect tweets around the Oscars to top any other trends, we will see. 2. Whilse #Indonesia tweets out-trended #Oscar tweets, trends are based on percentages of total tweets (at the time) and not sheer message numbers, so there is no guarantee there were more #Indonesia tweets sent. As the US comes online alongside Europe, more tweets will be sent (half of all Twitter users are in the USA), making it theoretically harder to for a hashtag (keyword) to trend. Still with me?! The fact remains that Indonesia did out shine the Oscars on Twitter...never mind the reasons why or for how long.