{"id":118218,"date":"2009-12-31T00:23:59","date_gmt":"2009-12-31T05:23:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.readwriteweb.com\/archives\/twitter_trends_in_2009_a_retrospective.php"},"modified":"2009-12-31T00:23:59","modified_gmt":"2009-12-31T05:23:59","slug":"twitter-trends-in-2009-a-retrospective","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/118218","title":{"rendered":"Twitter Trends in 2009: A Retrospective"},"content":{"rendered":"

Although the daily trends on Twitter over the past year have often been silly or even obscene<\/a>, hindsight has proven to be much more interesting.<\/p>\n

WhatTheTrend has compiled a great overview of Twitter hashtags and trending topics. Their Twitter Zeitgeist 2009<\/a> gives us food for thought as we move into a new, hopefully less gaming-prone<\/a> era of examining and measuring what real users are really talking about on the social web. Now, let’s talk about Twilight and Michael Jackson. Or, in the choose-your-own-adventure model of blog posts, you can skip to the part where we talk about tech-related trending topics<\/a> instead.<\/p>\n

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One of the most notable uses of any social network to date was the role of Twitter in the Iranian election\/debacle\/bloodbath. The U.S. State Department even made a call<\/a> when Twitter was scheduled for maintenance downtime during the pursuant protests because the messaging service had proven so vital to the democratic process in that country. The worldwide buzz – and the sudden surge of green-tinted user icons and locations changed to “Tehran” – make #iranelection the number one Twitter trend of 2009.<\/p>\n

In an interesting convergence between mainstream Internet use and high-tech geekery that only Google could engineer, Wave appears in the number four spot for top Twitter trends. And we have a pretty good idea that Twitter users’ out-and-out begging for an invite provided the bulk of that talk. As our loyal readers know, the ReadWriteWeb team is divided<\/a> on whether Wave is a win<\/a> or a fail<\/a> so far, but there’s no doubt that this tech launch was one of the hottest this year.<\/p>\n

In a stunning and welcome upset, #musicmonday pulled ahead of #followfriday, besting the well-known but spam-heavy hashtag by four places (Monday landed in the second position, Friday in the sixth). Is Follow Friday, a charming concept created with the most harmless intentions by our dear friend Micah Baldwin<\/a>, simply a trend that has seen its day? Or is there something about taste-making and multimedia content curation that draws users to simply participate more?<\/p>\n

Also, there are the films. New Moon, the second in the Twilight franchise, earned a number five spot in the rankings. We are grateful that our sole experience of these tweets are a brilliant collection of snarks<\/a> from professional lampooner, newly minted TV pretty boy<\/a> and TheOnion.com web editor Baratunde Thurston. Also-rans are Paranormal Activity, a horror flick that turned a $15,000 budget into around $80 million in box office receipts, and the latest Harry Potter movie. Finally, as a longtime Trekkie, I am happy to report that the new Star Trek film beat out Bruno by around 20 places in these rankings.<\/p>\n

Both the Palm Pre and BlackBerry were mentioned in the top 100 trends, and one of our top ten international apps<\/a>, Spotify, earned a number 63 spot on the list for consistent chatter and news throughout the year. Bing and Google Voice each earned a spot lower on the list, coming in at 81 and 100 respectively.<\/p>\n

Finally, to nod graciously in the direction of our good-natured rivals at Mashable<\/a>, their Open Web Awards were the 27th most talked-about thing on Twitter this year. For a topic that didn’t appear until mid-October (and for a topic generated by a tech blog, no less), this is a great measure of success for which Pete Cashmore and his team are to be congratulated.<\/p>\n

To get the full list, send an email to the folks at WhatTheTrend<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Discuss<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

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Although the daily trends on Twitter over the past year have often been silly or even obscene, hindsight has proven to be much more interesting. WhatTheTrend has compiled a great overview of Twitter hashtags and trending topics. Their Twitter Zeitgeist 2009 gives us food for thought as we move into a new, hopefully less gaming-prone […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":553,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-118218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/553"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=118218"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118218\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=118218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=118218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=118218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}