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Twitter’s Hot Topics of 2011

December has arrived, which means a host of internet entities will be dropping end-of-the-year data on us as the month rolls toward its inevitable conclusion and into 2012. Twitter has been fairly quick to the draw, and is already on the third of five entries in its 2011 Year In Review.

The first two pieces cataloged the major stories that flashed through its stream and the deluge of new high-profile users the service has taken on in the previous eleven months. Both of these lists are interesting to at least a fleeting degree, but the good stuff is in the third entry, Hot Topics, which was released today.

The trendiest food topic this year? McLobster. World news story? Mubarak’s resignation. And then there’s the top hashtags for the year, those indicators of Twitter power-use. We were given the following:

  1. #egypt
  2. #tigerblood
  3. #threewordstoliveby
  4. #idontunderstandwhy
  5. #japan
  6. #improudtosay
  7. #superbowl
  8. #jan25
Major world events, the Super Bowl, and some Twitter memes. And #tigerblood in second place for the year? I think it’s fair to say that Charlie Sheen is, indeed, #winning. As the only hashtag on the list that is identifiable with an individual, Sheen hit a vein of marketing gold when his maniacal wordsmithing took us into previously uncharted oceans of quotable nonsense. Egomaniacal brilliance.

Digital Visual: Are Twitter Profile Aesthetics Important?

With the re-launch of this blog (what must be the sixth iteration, at least), I started thinking about creating a more unified look for my presences across the countless blogs, social media sites, web services, etc. that I partake in. This site relies on a combination of a simple, but bold interface that utilizes a monochrome palette splashed with shocks of color (predominately light blues). This serves a number of purposes for me:

  1. Banners draw attention and contribute a useful visual focal point
  2. Grayscale is inherently easy on the eyes and contributes to readability
  3. Great typography also is easy on the eyes and contributes to readability
  4. Sparing use of color in a grayscale environment is visually exciting and draws the reader more easily than it would in a colorful site
  5. It’s clean and modern, but has a ton of subtle character
So when I started thinking about how to apply this to other internet properties that I am part of, I made the decision to try to uphold those elements and make sure my identity is at least somewhat consistent wherever someone may be tuning in. Considering that the service that receives most of my online efforts is Twitter, modifying my profile would be the next logical step.
But that got me thinking: How many people actually see my Twitter profile?
This is impossible to really tabulate, since I don’t have access to the metrics for my individual Twitter page, but it made me wonder what the likelihood of someone actually looking at my profile might be. I could dig down into all sorts of data and try to make pseudo-scientific guess, but that’s not really worth my time (or yours, for that matter). However, there is one specific statistic that may be able to add some perspective:

Of Twitter’s 100 million active users, only 13.88% use the Twitter website.

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