New software tracks most frequent retweets

President Barack Obama, Katy Perry and Beyoncé were the obvious yet predictable Twitter stars of Inauguration Day. But so, too, were @Christiana1987 (talking about African-American pride), @Lohanthony (on what a cool dude the president is) and a star from TV’s “Basketball Wives” mooning over first lady Michelle Obama’s style. A medley of the wildly popular and relatively anonymous served up the tweets that drove the most intense conversations as the 44th president took the oath again, according to new software tested for the first time on a large scale by Edelman Public Relations. The software, dubbed Flow140, yielded decidedly different results from the traditional Twitter trending list because it wasn’t aiming for the most popular terms but the most frequently retweeted remarks in specific, usually short, periods of time. The software graphed out real-time clusters of conversation, promising to predict what might go viral before it actually happens. What’s more, the graphing program can identify the original tweeter whose remark went viral. That can become useful in learning who the top online influencers really are.