Despite both being used to share news or interesting things with friends and colleagues, Facebook and Twitter couldn't be more different. That's pretty evident from the type of events that generated the most buzz on the two sites.
While news, celebrities and sporting events generally spark interest on both sites, Beyonce's pregnancy, which caused an explosion of tweets, is not even in the top ten most-talked-about events on Facebook.
It must be noted though that it's not a completely fair comparison. Twitter counted peak tweets per second, which favor events that generate a lot of interest at a particular time.
Facebook, on the other hand, looked at overall popularity, the total amount of status updates related to a particular event.
Osama bin Laden's death was the event that generated the most interest in Facebook globally, by quite a fair margin. The Super Bowl came in second, not surprising considering that the US is still the largest country on Facebook.
Deaths and meltdowns were also interesting, Steve Jobs, Amy Winehouse and Charlie Sheen all were mentioned by a lot of Facebook users.
Facebook also lists the top ten status trends in several countries, a great indicator of the things that were of local interest.
Facebook's Data Team compiled quite a lot of other things for this year's
Memology report. One thing that Facebook looks at every year is three-letter words that go viral.
This year, "lms" battled it out with "tbh." Lms stands for "like my status," a friendly reminder that the like button is the quickest way of showing appreciation. "Tbh" is short for "to be honest" and has been used well before Facebook, but has gone viral this year.
Last year's fastest growing term was "hmu," aka "hit me up."
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