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Facebook introduce Memology to Track the Years Most Popular Topics and Trends

Yesterday Facebook announced (via their blog) the most popular trends and topics, or memes, that infected users’ Facebook status updates over the last 12 months.  The full article contains a variety of interesting statistics about the most popular topics of discussion through 2009.

Some of the most popular terms of the year were directly tied into the increasing prevalence of Facebook itself and social networking in General.  As everyone in the world (and their ‘Yard’ loving parents) appears to flock towards Facebook the acronym FB becomes increasingly common; 7 times more common according to the study.  Additionally there was a boom in the number of people both discussing Twitter and using the acronym RT (Retweet) in their status updates.

In a similar vein the expanding public awareness of Facebook has resulted in a wider demographic of users.  The increasing number of older users have been deemed responsible for the increases in mentions of “kids” and “yards”, which seen sizable increases in usage through 2009.

Predictably the goings on in the media industries causes impact status updates.  Films such as “New Moon”, “Star Trek” and “The Hangover” all resulted in status spikes and “Lady GaGa” became the most discussed new musical star.  On a more sombre note numerous celebrity deaths also caused dramatic spikes in Facebook updates, the passing of Michael Jackson in particular resulted in his name being mentioned 10,000 times more frequently than it had been previously.

Looking over the Report on trending terms gives a fairly interesting summary of how things in both the online and real worlds have changed over the last 12months, and in some cases, what has caused these changes.

Why not post your predictions for 2010s hottest topics in the comment section below now?



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