The year isn’t quite over yet, but Twitter has already come out with the top trending topics for 2010, and surprisingly enough Justin Bieber — the guy who is so popular that Twitter had to modify the way it calculates trending topics — did not take the top slot. That went to the Gulf oil spill. Soccer and movies were also top discussion topics, relegating Mr. Bieber to the number eight spot on Twitter’s list (although he did get number one on the people-related trend list). The numbers came from Twitter’s analysis of more than 25 billion tweets sent during the year.
Trending topics have been a somewhat controversial issue for Twitter over the past week or so, with a number of users accusing the company of censoring its trends to keep WikiLeaks from being a top discussion topic. Twitter eventually posted an explanation of how it arrives at the top trends, noting that the feature is designed to show topics that are being discussed more than they have been previously — in other words, if Bieber discussion is hot and heavy for days at a time, then that becomes the benchmark and it will not become a trending topic until it goes above that level.