What Twitter and Facebook’s 2009 Trends Tell Us About Ourselves

http://mashable.com/2009/12/27/twitter-facebook-2009/ The Social Analyst is a weekly column by Mashable Co-Editor Ben Parr, where he digs into social media trends and how they are affecting companies in the space. As the year comes to a close, several social media companies decided to take a look back and reflect on the events, people, technologies that captured our interest this year. Twitter took the first crack when it revealed the most discussed topics of 2009. Facebook was next when it released its Facebook Memology for the year. Both reports are interesting and have a lot of useful information, yet nobody's really taken the time to analyze just what these trends mean. What did our society care about, and why? What scared the crap out of us? How were our tastes different this year than they were last year? While I could take days analyzing trending topics (weeks if you give me the raw data), I only have so much time for this column. This is why I wanted to share with you some of my conclusions about this year's trend data from Facebook and Twitter. First, A Recap of Facebook and Twitter's Top Trends of 2009 Before you start reading this week's column, please make sure to take a good, long look at this year's top trends for Facebook and Twitter. First, Twitter's 2009 trending topics: READ MORE : http://mashable.com/2009/12/27/twitter-facebook-2009/