166 days

Athima Chansanchai

Osama bin Laden's death tops 2011 Facebook status updates

In the past year, on Facebook, were you a cheesehead who had to rave about your team's big win, an avid follower of world news, or a pop culture junkie whose updates revolved around royal weddings and celebrity train wrecks?

If any of those rang a bell, you're in company with millions who posted about similar events.

Amongst your friends' Facebook status updates this past year you probably saw major events interspersed amid anecdotes about their kids, and at the top of the 2011 global topics were the death of Osama bin Laden, the Green Bay Packers Super Bowl victory and the Casey Anthony verdict.

Facebook culled the status updates of its 750 million-plus members and created a "Memology 2011" that they explain as taking "the pulse of this global community by comparing this year's status updates to last year's, unearthing the most popular topics and cultural trends — or memes — emerging on Facebook. Whether it's hmu, lms or tbh, each year brings a new set of three letter acronyms that go viral."

We've already told you the top 3, so to round out the top 10, here are the biggest topics posted on Facebook status updates over the past year: the ever "winning" Charlie Sheen, the death of Steve Jobs, the royal nuptials of William and Kate, Amy Winehouse's early exit from this world, the videogame Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Libya military ops and Hurricane Irene.

The death of bin Laden shot to the top of the talkers on Facebook on May 1, when "almost 10 percent of all status updates in English mentioned news of his death."

As for memes, the hands-down winner in 2011, at least on Facebook, was planking. 

And as for those three letter acronyms, the top 2011 ones were "lms" (like my status) and "tbh" (to be honest), with "the most iconic status update" for the year was a mash-up of the two: "lms for a tbh."

More stories:

• Facebook glitch reveals private photos -- including Zuckerberg's
• Etsy scans your Facebook friends for gift ideas
• Woman fights to put Effin on Facebook

Check out Technolog on Facebook, and on Twitter, follow Athima Chansanchai, who is also trying to keep her head above water in the Google+ stream.