14 DAY TRIAL // T'is the season for number crunching. As the year draws to a close, everyone is releasing all sorts of stats, tops and trends. Facebook, with 350 million users and an unseemly amount of data flowing through its pipes, couldn't pass out on this opportunity so it's introducing what will become a yearly fixture, "Memology," the study of 'memes' and meme-related topics.
"In the tradition of year-end lists, we're introducing Facebook Memology. "Memology" refers to the study of how "memes," or new ideas and trends, are spreading on Facebook. For this year's list, the Facebook Data Team mapped the top trending words and phrases in U.S. status updates for 2009," Facebook's Lars Backstrom wrote.
"While significant news events and celebrities made the list, more personal topics like family, religion and even emerging digital slang were as common—no doubt reflecting the way people share their daily lives with friends on Facebook."
The list isn't an exact account of the number of times the words popped up, rather Facebook grouped similar subject matters, words and phrases to come up with a top which looked at the topics discussed rather than the actual words.
The biggest topic on Facebook for the year, no surprise here: Facebook Applications. With the number of spammy games and apps littering everyone's status updates with meaningless chatter, there was no doubt that this would be the 'hot' topic of the year. Hopefully, the changes Facebook has in the works will remove these updates from the main feed and clean up the site so 2010 won't see the same trend, but for now Farmville and company takes the top spot.
Coming in at number two, and this one is a bit unexpected, is everyone's self-deprecating leitmotif 'FML'. People complaining about their lives is hardly something new, the interesting thing here is the pattern which Facebook's data team discovered. The term hit a high in early May "when students were busy with finals and the weather was rainy just before summer" as Facebook puts it. It then leveled off during the summer, but also saw a regular resurgence on Mondays and Tuesdays.
The list is rather predictable from here on with "swine flu," "celebrity deaths," "movies," and other generic terms filling out the top spots all the way down to number ten where, low and behold, 'Twitter'. The microblogging service saw a huge gain in popularity, especially at the start of the year, which leveled off but remained strong for the rest of the year. Interestingly, 'Facebook' didn't make into Twitter's own top trends of 2009 list.
