Twitter data shows trending topics tend to change rapidly

Twitter has taken a deeper look into how quickly its users change the terms or phrases they tweet on a given topic, or their churn rate, and released some of this data today. 

For example, when Steve Jobs passed away, people began rapidly including "Steve Jobs" in their tweets, but a short while later "Apple" began trending, then "Pixar," and finally "Stay foolish."

"Looking at terms and phrases in Tweets and in real-time search queries, we see that the most frequent terms in one hour or day tend to be very different from those in the next -- significantly more so than in other content on the web," Twitter research scientist on analytics Jimmy Lin wrote in a blog post.