What were all your friends talking about on Facebook this year? Mostly some high-profile deaths, an impending natural disaster, the Royal Wedding, and the Green Bay Packers.
On Tuesday, Facebook released their annual Memology report, which analyzes trends in status updates, including cultural trends, popular topics, and acronyms (WTF FB, quit looking at our updates). According to Mashable, in 2011, status updates (much like Yahoo! searches and Twitter hashtags) were a vaguely depressing potpourri of death, destruction, and joyous occasions. The death of Osama bin Laden topped the global status trend list, followed by the Packers winning the Super Bowl, the not-guilty verdict in the Casey Anthony trial, Charlie Sheen’s rants, the death of Steve Jobs, and rounding out the top five, the royal wedding of Kate Middleton to Prince William. What else had people running to Facebook to update their status? The sudden death of singer Amy Winehouse, the video game Call of Duty 3, the start of military operations in Libya and Hurricane Irene.
This year’s Memology list also highlighted the fastest-growing trends in news, entertainment (Skrillex, anyone?), memes and sports. This year, football of the rest-of-the-world variety topped the list, along with the LA Lakers. In entertainment, the television show House, M.D., the Harry Potter films, singer Rihanna, the planking meme, and actress Megan Fox were the most talked (…er, typed) about on Facebook. As for those acronyms, 2011 was the year of LMS (like my status) and TBH, which stands for “to be honest.” In summary, TBH, we’re not sure what to make of all this, except that 2012 has a lot to live up to.
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