Facebook Memology : What’s the Top Status Trends of 2009

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Following the noisy privacy changes, Facebook released the a new feature that lists the top status updates for the year. Facebook would keep a track of the most popular terms in the Status updates, which it calls Memology. Essentially, Memology would be a study on how memes are spreading on Facebook. If you are confused what’s ‘memes’, let me explain comprehensively - its the  idea, belief or pattern of behavior that spreads throughout a culture either vertically by cultural inheritance. Overtly, social networking is the recent culture and Facebook is the ace. There’s much talk about the list of most popular status trends, but without any focus on its implications.  Let’s have an insight of the list of status trends on Facebook.

Facebook Application tops the list of Facebook Memology. As we go down the list it gets more and more interesting. Not only the top news events and celebrities, but more personal topics such as family, religion and digital slang were as common—no doubt reflecting the way people share their daily lives with friends on Facebook.

FML is the second meme in the line that stands for f*** my life. This is generally used by most Facebook buffs highlight what’s going on in their life. Swine Flu and Celebrity Deaths occupied the third and fourth slot. Facebook graphically shows the peak of the meme and the days on which it was high.

What’s most interesting in the list is inclusion of Twitter on the 10th spot and RT(retweet) as a popular meme. It seems that Facebook was technically bound to accept that popularity of its arch rival. This is particularly amusing as Facebook doesn’t appear on Twitter’s year-end list, which appears to be filtered out. Obviously, Facebook receives the award for fair-play.

Having said that, what remains to be seen is that Facebook tries to show on its growth chart, Twitter was peaked during April and is gradually loosing its momentum.

Still what irks is, we are in dark about the demography of the sample chosen by Facebook. There are no specifications about the demography of the area where Facebook collected the data from.