The Facebook Blog

 

For our second Facebook Memology study, we looked at what terms grew the most in status updates in 2010 compared to the year before. The results reflect the highs and lows of world events that started a global conversation, new uses of language online and the sharing of popular culture between friends.

 

World Moments

 

Whether it be the tragedy of the Haitian earthquake or the heroic rescue of the Chilean miners ("mineros" in Spanish), global news events captured the world's attention. People shared their collective sadness, concern and hope. Some even let the world know what was happening on the ground in Haiti and Chile.

 

The world came together for the World Cup, with as many as a half of all status updates referring to the competition at some points during the games.

 

Say What?

 

While HMU made its debut, it wasn't the only digital vernacular to make the list. Talk about "airplanes" surged this year, not because people suddenly discovered travel but because they were citing lyrics from the hugely popular song "Airplanes" by B.o.B. "Barn raising" was the most popular phrase for the Games category as gamers on Facebook asked their friends to help them out on FarmVille.

 

Bieber Fever

 

Popular culture also shaped people's conversations with each other. Justin Bieber fans couldn't keep their enthusiasm to themselves, making him the only musician on the list. As popular movies such as "Toy Story 3" and "The Twilight Saga: Eclipse" premiered, friends shared their opinions. And who didn't want to look hip by telling their friends about their new iPad or iPhone 4?

 

For this year's look at Memology, we analyzed status updates across 236 countries. We computed the rate at which each phrase occurred in 2010 and compared that to 2009, looking for ones that had increased by both a large percentage and a large volume (view last year's list). All personally identifiable information was removed from the status updates to conduct this analysis.

 

When the words and phrases we analyzed related to each other, we grouped them into categories for the global list that follows. 

 

 

1. HMU

 

The shorthand for "hit me up" was this year's biggest surprise. In early 2009, the acronym HMU was virtually unheard of. Only a few posts a day contained HMU, and half of them were probably typos. By May, however, it started to grow slowly and was averaging about 20 posts a day. The volume roughly doubled every month, and by the end of 2009 it had risen to 1,600 posts a day—too modest of a number to be on our radar for last year's list.

 

However, HMU continued to grow aggressively throughout 2010, increasing by about 75 percent each month. By the end of summer, HMU reached 80,000 mentions per day.

 

In early September, an interesting pattern emerged in how people use HMU. Until that point, it was spreading like wildfire, but was being used with roughly equal frequency throughout the week. In September this changed, as usage rates started going through huge swings from day to day. The reason? Before September the demographic most likely to ask their friends to "HMU" was on summer break and looking to hang out most nights. Then many of these folks headed back to school, and HMU became a weekend-oriented request.

 

 

2. World Cup

 

The World Cup was the biggest sporting event anywhere in 2010, and because of the global presence of Facebook people took to the virtual streets to cheer on their teams and boo their rivals.  The start of the games and the finals garnered the most attention, with 1.5 million and 1.3 million mentions, respectively, of "World Cup" and countless more mentions of teams and players. At key moments over the course of the games, as many as 50 percent of all status updates were related to them.  So big was this event that we collaborated with the New York Times to track mentions of every player in the games.

 

3. Movies

 

As with last year's list, big movies were much talked about. "Toy Story 3," "The Twilight Saga: Eclipse," "Inception," "Alice in Wonderland" and "Iron Man 2" were the five most discussed (in that order).

 

It's fascinating to look in more depth at the opening weekend of "Toy Story 3." To do this, we divided updates between the web and mobile. As is typical, the movie opened on a Friday, but with midnight screenings in select U.S. locations. The showtime itself didn't elicit many posts, but we saw big spikes a couple of hours later, when the movie ended and movie-goers reported their opinions.  

 

Naturally, the people updating their status to report on the movie via their mobile phones were able to do so as soon as it ended, while the people reporting on their computers had to get home first. The difference in the spikes between mobile and web gives us an approximation of how long it takes people to get out of the theater, go home and fire up Facebook—about half an hour.

 

4. iPad and iPhone 4

 

In May, Apple surpassed long-time rival Microsoft in market capitalization, thanks in large part to two of the most discussed products of the year: the iPad and iPhone 4. These two products combined to account for over 25 million bragging, lusting or the occasional condemning posts during the year.

 

5. Haiti

 

The impact of the Jan. 12 earthquake was widely felt through status updates. Even though most people were far away, they shared the shock, concern and news both among their friends and to the world. One Boston woman was trapped with a group of 36 fellow travelers in Haiti and took to updating her status to find out from her friends what was happening and to let families know the group was safe.

 

Within one minute of the 7.0-magnitude earthquake's strike, status updates started rolling in. With the infrastructure in Haiti badly damaged, many of the first reports were from people in the nearby Dominican Republic (where earthquake is "terremoto"), who felt the powerful quake at a distance.  Firsthand reports peaked four minutes after the quake hit, at a rate of 120 a minute. It took another couple of hours for the world to learn of the disaster, and a day later people on Facebook were discussing it at a peak rate of 1,800 posts per minute. 

 

 

6. Justin Bieber

 

Bieber Fever struck before 2010, but by all accounts this was a standout year for the 15-year-old pop music star. The surge in mentions continued to grow throughout the year, largely following the rise in his career. He started 2010 with the release in January of his biggest hit, "Baby." His Sept. 12 debut on the MTV Video Music Awards attracted the most mentions of him.

 

7. Games on Facebook

 

Games are popular applications on Facebook, and references appeared throughout this year's list. The biggest trending phrase was "barn raising." No, there wasn't a mass exodus from cities to the country life among people on Facebook. Instead, they were recruiting their friends to virtual versions of the old-time tradition of a community event to build a new barn. This started when FarmVille launched a barn-raising feature in January. FrontierVille, launched in June, also grew in mentions.

 

8. Mineros/Miners

 

The story of the 33 Chilean miners trapped underground for 69 days captivated the world. People globally watched the truly inspiring story unfold as they were rescued one by one after an unimaginable time underground.

 

Looking at the mentions of miners and the Spanish "mineros," we saw three distinct bursts of activity. The first one occurred exclusively in Chile in August, when the mine first collapsed and contact with the miners was lost. A week later, the miners were miraculously found alive and the rest of the world started to talk about them a little bit, but the story was still predominantly in Chile. Over the course of the next 60 days, the world watched the trials and tribulations as workers above ground scrambled to drill rescue shafts.

 

When the ordeal finally ended, millions of people posted about it. In fact, they watched so carefully that when we zoom in to look at posts during the rescue, we see 33 unique spikes in activity—one for each of the rescued miners.

 

 



9. Airplanes

 

Using the word "airplanes" is nothing new or noteworthy—most years. But in 2010, it burst onto the scene in status messages thanks to the catchy lyrics of the international hit song "Airplanes." A deeper look showed that people were specifically quoting the following line, often times to share a personal wish and sometimes when they were traveling.

 

 

10. 2011

 

Similar to last year, people talked frequently about years in their status updates. People are looking forward to big personal events in the coming year—perhaps a wedding or an expectant child. References to 2011 showed a big spike on Jan. 1, 2010, as people took the new year as an opportunity to look ahead another full year. As the date approaches, mentions have steadily increased, as people make more and more plans for the coming year.

 

 

Lars, a data scientist at Facebook, is starting a trend for next year's list by spreading new acronyms.

1 - Facebook Applications

Specific words: Farmville, Farm Town, Social Living

Facebook has provided a platform for developers to create a number of hugely popular applications, and it is no surprise that people are talking about them. You could almost say that 2009 was the year of the farm in status updates. Since its emergence in June 2009, Farmville became the most talked-about application in status updates and now boasts over 72 million monthly active users. It wasn't alone. Farm Town also ranked highly, as did general discussions with the word "farm."

2 - FML

Specific word: FML

This digital slang became the hottest acronym to enter the Facebook lexicon in 2009. It spread from relatively low usage to become a mainstream word in status updates. FML is used almost exclusively online and in text messages, and its meaning, once very specific, has broadened. People now use it simply to express some frustration with an aspect of their lives. We'll leave the "F" open to your interpretation, but the "M" and L" stand for "My Life."

The beginning of May appeared to be a seriously frustrating time for people, when students were busy with finals and the weather was rainy just before summer. We saw a lull in "FML" in the summer months and, as expected, there was strong weekly periodicity to this term with it appearing most often on Mondays and Tuesdays.

3 - Swine Flu

Specific words: Flu, Swine Flu, H1N1

Swine flu, or H1N1, was probably the biggest ongoing news story of the year. Discussion of H1N1 in status updates reached a peak in the spring—long before the flu itself began affecting many people. When flu season began in the fall, people began discussing the term again, though never with the same frequency as when it first appeared. Another interesting trend is that no one called the virus H1N1 when it first appeared, but by September the effort to disassociate the term "swine" from the illness was fairly successful and "H1N1" occurrences now roughly equal "swine." Surprisingly, the use of the word "flu" over the year consistently peaked during the middle of the week and was at its lowest on Sundays. We're not sure why.

4 - Celebrity Deaths

Specific words: Michael Jackson, Patrick Swayze, Billy Mays

No celebrity death had as immediate of an impact on status updates as Michael Jackson's. Mentions of his name were 10,000 times higher on June 25, the day he died, than the previous day, and no other unexpected news event can compare to the burst we saw on that day. Despite the huge impact of this story, mentions of his name lasted only about a week, with a resurgence during his memorial 12 days later. Rather surprisingly, Patrick Swayze's death was almost as large with about two-thirds as many mentions as Michael Jackson's on the peak day of status updates about Swayze.

5 - Family

Specific words: Family, Mom, Dad, Son, Daughter, Kids

As Facebook becomes more prevalent across demographics, people talk more about "mom," "dad," "son" and "daughter". We saw significant increases in all sorts of family-related words during 2009. Perhaps the most dramatic increase was "kids," a word whose occurrence went up by a factor of five.

6 - Movies

Specific words: New Moon, Transformers, Star Trek, The Hangover, Paranormal Activity and Harry Potter

Whenever a new movie comes out, it creates a big spike in discussion in Facebook status updates. The most-discussed of 2009 was "New Moon." It narrowly edged out the big summer movies "Harry Potter" and "Transformers." Other big movies on Facebook were "Star Trek," "The Hangover" and "Paranormal Activity".

7 - Sports

Specific words: Steelers, Yankees

In February of 2009, the Pittsburgh Steelers won the Super Bowl, and in October the New York Yankees won the World Series. The Steelers reached a higher peak in mentions, but largely because they only played a single football game to garner the top prize. The Yankees were discussed a bit less per day, but the discussion occurred over a longer period of time throughout the multiple games of baseball's World Series. We'll call this one a tie to avoid playing favorites or sparking sports-supremacy debates.

8 - Health Care

Specific words: Health Care, No one should have to…

Since President Barack Obama took office, the discussion of "health care" has risen steadily in status updates. This reached a peak in early September when millions of pro-reform users updated their status with the following message: "No one should die because they cannot afford health care, and no one should go broke because they get sick. If you agree, please post this as your status for the rest of the day." For two days, millions of people posted this to their profiles in support of health care reform. The meme continued to circulate, gradually declining over the weeks that followed. Even aside from that meme, health care mentions are up 10 times since a year ago.

9 - FB

Specific words: FB, FB Friends, News Feed

Whenever we make a change to the site a lot of people chime in with their opinions. For instance, we see spikes in mentions of "News Feed" on the order of 100-times increases whenever there is a change to the way that feature works or how the home page is laid out. "FB" and "FB Friends," on the other hand, have nothing to do with product changes, but as Facebook has become more prevalent people are shortening our name for convenience. Usage of the word "FB" has increased about 7 fold since the beginning of 2009 and "FB Friends" increased about 10 times over the same period.

10 - Twitter

Specific words: Twitter, RT

Talk about Twitter took off at the beginning of the year. April showed a peak of activity and momentum, though mentions of the word "Twitter" decreased over the past few months. The acronym "RT," standing for "retweet," entered the lexicon along with the word "Twitter" in September of 2008 and has become a common acronym to describe reposting activity.

11 - Years

Specific words: 2008, 2009, 2010

Many status updates are about what people are going to do or have just done, so naturally they often contain dates. While the number of posts containing a date didn't go up dramatically in 2009, the date itself changed to reflect the current and upcoming year.

12 - Lady Gaga

Specific words: Gaga, Poker Face

Lady Gaga was the biggest new performer of 2009 based on status updates from people in the U.S. She was virtually unmentioned until November of 2008 and spiked in mentions of her name in September of 2009 during the MTV Video Music Awards. At the end of September, Christopher Walken's performance of the song "Poker Face" caused a spike in that term, but didn't noticeably impact occurrences of "Lady Gaga."

13 - Yard

Specific word: Yard

This is a trend that nobody would have guessed. The word "yard" seems fairly uncommon, and indeed it barely breaches a rate of five mentions in every 10,000 status updates. When we compare 2009 to 2008, however, we see a huge increase. Have all the hipsters turned to yard work as the latest fad? Probably not. A more likely explanation is that hipsters' moms and dads are also on Facebook, and these folks have yards that require some tending.

14 - Religion

Specific words: Easter, Lord, God

Religious terms increased a significant amount in the last year. In the last 6 months, there was a noticeable upward trend in occurrences of "Lord" and "God." While "Easter" occurs infrequently most of the time, the Easter Sunday spike from 2009 is about 30 percent higher than it was in 2008.

15 - I

Specific words: I, is

Until March of 2009, people updated their status in a box that appeared next to their name on the home page and, consequently, many updates started with the word "is." Once that box no longer was shown next to people's name, the usage of "is" dropped off dramatically and usage of "I" doubled almost overnight. Prior to March of 2009, "is" represented about 9 percent of all words in status updates. With the change in interface, it remained high in absolute terms, but dropped all the way to about 1.5 percent recently while "I" increased from 1 percent to about 2.5 percent.


Lars Backstrom, a data scientist at Facebook, is heading to Iowa to investigate some farms.