Current Affairs And Football Top 2010 Tweet List

Matthew Broersma,

Twitter has revealed that news stars such as Paul the psychic octopus have topped its list of tweets for 2010

Twitter has released lists of the top terms tweeted by its users over the course of the year, with the Gulf oil spill taking the overall lead as the top topic of conversation.

Current events were also represented by the Haiti earthquake, at No. 4, while the FIFA World Cup was represented by two terms in the overall top five – “FIFA World Cup” at No. 2 and the vuvuzela at No. 5. Paul, the octopus famous for predicting the outcomes of Germany’s matches in the World Cup, was also represented at No. 10 (“Pulpo Paul”).

Entertainment and IT

Entertainment terms took up three places on the overall top 10 list – the films “Inception” and “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” at Nos. 3 and 9, respectively, and the Canadian pop star Justin Bieber at No. 8.

As for IT, it accounted for only two of the terms in the top 10 list, with Apple beating Google to No. 6 on the list with “Apple iPad”, and “Google Android” at No. 7.

Twitter also analysed the terms by categories – News Events, People, Movies, Television, Technology, World Cup, Sports and Hashtag.

Last year top tweeted terms included Iran’s elections, Michael Jackson, Harry Potter, American Idol, the Super Bowl, Google Wave, and the hash tag #musicmonday.

The micro-blogging site went through its first major revamp in September, in order to provide an easier, faster, and richer multi-media experience for its millions of users.

Redesign

Rather than the previous model of a single stream of constantly updated tweets, Twitter switched to spreading information over two “panes” – one for the real-time stream of tweets, and the other for deeper context and embedded media, such as photos and videos within the text.

Earlier this month Twitter rushed to defend itself against accusations that it is blocking #wikileaks and #cablegate from topping its Trends list of popular Tweet topics. Though unconfirmed, Twitter was reportedly attacked and the site was blocked for two hours.

Wikileaks Cablegate appeared on No. 7 of the News Events list.

Last week, Google published its annual Zeitgeist list, revealing the search terms that Brits have been using most frequently on the popular search engine. The top search terms in the UK this year were Facebook, BBC, YouTube, Hotmail and eBay, the company claimed.