What the cool kids do
We've had a spasm of 2010 lists published in the past few days, all offering some insight into what the cool online kids are talking about.
For many of us who have things like families, jobs and mortgages, and thus a limit to the amount of time we can spend surfing, this will have been the first time we encountered any of these ‘popular' trends. This feeling of being excluded from most online memes was reinforced when looking over the ten most popular Facebook status updates of the year.
A new entry, straight in at number one, is HMU. Yes, you read that right; it stands not for hair and make-up, nor huge malevolent unicorn, but ‘hit me up'. While this term at first appears urban, seedy and possibly drug-related, it apparently coveys the desire on the part of the person writing it to be engage in virtual social intercourse.
According to Facebook, this isn't the only piece of ‘digital vernacular' to make the top ten. ‘Airplanes' was apparently a reference to a song by B.o.B. rather than the airborne transport. Meanwhile, within the games category, ‘barn raising' is a request for help in Farmville.
The rest of the list is a bit more consistent with what we've seen elsewhere. The World Cup was a biggie, as was the Haitian earthquake and the Chilean miners. Apple dominated technology, while Justin Bieber was ubiquitous in pop culture. Bizarrely the tenth biggest status update trend of 2010 was 2011.
Incidentally, some Facebook intern has rendered a diagram of a few million Facebook users and their friends based on location. The result is a funky map of the world, with the notable omission of China and Russia.
