Facebook, the world-crushing social network, has just released some absolutely amazing data harvested from tracking (anonymously), millions of Facebook status updates throughout the year.
Dubbed Facebook “Memeology,” Facebook is trying to track changes in what people are talking about over time. Think of it like Twitter Trends, just not as spammed, short lived, or dull.
Facebook of course has access to more data about the global population than can be reckoned, and so this data is well sourced, sampled, and accurate. And that is what makes it so sad. To snap the suspense, here are the top status trends of 2009, we will break them down after the jump:
The largest trend, Facebook Applications stems from an insidious practice of Zynga taking over the status of most of your friends. Facebook said it well: “You could almost say that 2009 was the year of the farm in status updates.” You know what that means, Farmville.
Gag me with a towel. Farmville, if you listen to the TNW podcast you know is a hated contagion. But that does segue into the second top trending meme: FML.
If people wanted to prove that opening Facebook past the top 20 universities in the US changed the IQ spread a touch, this should clinch it. The top two trending memes were: I play a spammy farm game online, and I hate my life.
The list has a few things to be expected, Twitter was a big deal this year, as was Lady Gaga. Facebook changed the way that you update your status, so that the use of the personal pronoun makes sense.
And of course, this has been the year of the bucket-kicking celebrity, so to see that in its slot is perfectly reasonable. Facebook has a few pretty graphs if you are into that sort of thing.
What do you think of the data?
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