Facebook status updates over the last year traversed everything from personal gibberish about someone’s cat to world changing events to a certain swoopy-haired teenage pop star. Facebook recently released Facebook Memology 2010 which contains some stats, charts and commentary on what their databases have collected over the last year. Some of the trending topics weren’t surprising. Some were annoying. Some were warranted and indicative of the fact that many of us follow what goes on in the rest of the world and care about it a lot.
All of this data came from you, the people. Below is a chart I pulled from the Facebook blog. I couldn’t help but add my two cents about a few of the trending topics that have my support (and sometimes disgust) for making the list.
1. HMU
Apparently I missed my ride on the acronym party bus that left the communication station earlier this year. The number one topic/keyword, at least as far as mentions go, was “HMU,” which means “hit me up.” I’ve never used this term in any of my tweets, text messages or Facebook statuses. I must either already be a social geezer or I’ve put a lid on new acronyms in an attempt to ensure that I won’t contribute too heavily to the ongoing de-evolution of the english language. For the sake of easing my curious mind, I ran a Twitter search for the hashtag “#HMU” and to the opposite of my surprise, 95% of the tweets containing “HMU” were a horrible waste of keystrokes with an enthusiastic emphasis on misspelled slang. Oh those crazy kids.
2. World Cup
Regardless if I was at a party, a bar, a restaurant or a friend’s low-fi BBQ, almost everyone was into the World Cup on some level. I think this event is the only time people really feel like they can take pride in their ethnic background without all the guilt and over-sensitivity. People made that clear via hundreds of thousands of smart phones, posting their thoughts and cheers and jeers to Facebook walls while watching the World Cup with their buddies at a local watering hole near you.
6. Justin Bieber
I’m speechless. The number 6 most publicly discussed topic on a global social network that has more than half a billion people on it, is Justin Bieber. Do the math. After reading that data point, my faith in humanity immediately teetered on living out my own version of “Into The Wild.” Human souls are apparently being harvested on Facebook.
10. 2011
I think this is interesting. The number 10 keyword mentioned in status updates during 2010 on Facebook was “2011,” or next year, essentially. Apparently we talk about the future often.
I haven’t seen the Twitter version of this dataset yet but it’ll be interesting to see a comparison of top trending discussion topics between both Facebook and Twitter, especially since there is probably a decent percentage of people on Facebook that are not even aware of what Twitter is or how it works.
