What did *you* tweet about in 2012? Twitter releases end-of-year data

Twitter just released new data about its user interactions from 2012 — all on a brand new website.

The site, 2012.twitter.com, pulls out specific instances of the most retweeted update, the most tweeted events, significant trends, and more. The data more or less matches up with the most popular events from the news cycle, including the 2012 presidential election, the NFL referee strike, and the Olympics. But one interesting thing Twitter did with its report was create a category that represents data that’s more or less unique to the microblogging social network.

The company listed the following categories and explanations:

• Golden Tweets: The top two tweets that generated the most retweets for the year, plus honorable mentions for a few others that caught attention around the world.
• The pulse of the planet: Some of the biggest conversations of the year that generated large numbers of tweets and retweets.
• Only on Twitter: Moments of serendipity and just plain awesomeness (if there is such a thing) are what we call #onlyontwitter. We list examples of tweets that came to life organically on Twitter and can be appreciated in an instant.
• Top trends: Lists of the significant trends of the year in the U.S., UK, and Japan. These phrases reveal what captured our attention based on sudden spike of interest, rather than what was consistently popular.
• New voices: From the Pope to Pelé, this year Twitter welcomed new voices from every corner of the world.

In addition to the year-end report site, Twitter also teamed up with Vizify to provide individual stats on each user. You simply need to plug your information into Vizify to pull up the data, which gives you an overview of your most tweeted-about topics. (In my case, VentureBeat pops up at the top of the list, followed by Netflix and Reddit.)

photo credit: Rosaura Ochoa via photopin cc