Barack Obama's popularity on the web has skyrocketed since the beginning of this year, as a search on Google Trends shows:
However, it is unclear exactly why Google's algorithm has chosen to indent Mr Obama's Twitter page in the UK results. Although the page has a considerably higher number of inbound links than other popular Twitter user pages, the Google.com results for the same search term show the Twitter login page as the indented result. The login page would seem to be a more relevant result for most people searching for "twitter".
Twitter is a social networking and microblogging site where users can post regular bite-sized updates to their profile and keep track of other users' updates. It has become the darling of the social media scene over the last year and has grown hugely in popularity despite some recent technical issues. It may not have quite the profile of Facebook or MySpace yet but it has certainly become a big player in the market and, for some, has become a useful tool in online marketing.
Most recently, Twitter hit the headlines when numerous users made reports of the recent earthquake in China over an hour before it was reported in by the major news networks.
Twitter users choose to "follow" other users whose updates or "Tweets" they want to read. Barack Obama is now the third most popular Twitter user with 41,863 "followers" at the time of writing.
