The number one spot on the top ten list was grabbed by the Mexican Gulf oil spill that happened after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded on 20 April. The second spot went to the FIFA World Cup, showing that South Africa got the world talking with a spectacular event. The third most tweeted trend was the Leonardo di Caprio movie Inception, followed by the Haiti earthquake in fourth place and the noisy Vuvuzela in fifth.. 

 

According to the official Twitter blog a massive 25 billion tweets were sent this year. Along with the overall top ten, Twitter also provided eight other categories: News Events, People, Movies, Television, Technology, World Cup, Sports and Hashtags.

 

In the technology category the top trends consisted of the Apple iPad at number one, followed by Android, Apple iOS and the Apple iPhone, showing that Apple dominated the world of technology this year. The top tweeted movie was Inception while basketball star Lebron James was the most tweeted sport star. 

 

The locally held 2010 FIFA World Cup had its own category and the things most tweeted in this category was the FIFA World Cup itself, followed by that annoying but much loved South African instrument the vuvuzela. 

 

In News Events the top tweet was the Mexican Gulf oil spill, followed respectively by the Haitian earthquake and the Pakistani floods. The most tweeted about person went to the infamous Justin Bieber followed by Brazilian president Dilma Rouseff and singer Lady Gaga. Julian Assange of Wikileaks fame dropped in at number four.

 

The most popular hashtags were #rememberwhen, #slapyourself, #confessiontime and #thingsimiss. 

 

Twitter started following trends in 2008 using a complex algorithm to record and analyse tweets. With over 95 million tweets every day, the algorithm gets a pretty good idea of what people are tweeting about and what trends they are following.

 

You can see the full lists of all eight categories on the official Twitter blog.