News of natural disasters, the World Cup and popular movies were among the top Facebook status updates in 2010, but the number one trend from this past year has many older users scratching their heads.
According to Facebook's second Memology study which looked at what terms spawned the most in status updates compared to the year before, members worldwide urged their friends and family members to "HMU," which stands for hit me up.
Whether used when looking for something to do or just getting off work, the acronym was barely used last year but grew suddenly and steadily throughout 2010, especially during summer breaks and weekends, according to Lars Backstorm, a data scientist for Facebook.
"By May, however, it started to grow slowly and was averaging about 20 posts a day," Backstorm wrote via a blog on Facebook. "The volume roughly doubled every month, and by the end of 2009 it had risen to 1,600 posts a day—too modest of a number to be on our radar for last year's list."
HMU continued to grow aggressively throughout 2010, increasing by about 75 percent each month. By the end of summer, HMU reached 80,000 mentions per day.
The second most discussed topic on Facebook statuses this year was the World Cup. The start of the games and the finals garnered the most attention, with 1.5 million and 1.3 million mentions, respectively, of "World Cup" and countless more mentions of teams and players.
"At key moments over the course of the games, as many as 50 percent of all status updates were related to them," Backstorm noted.
Movies were also a popular talk of conversation in 2010. "Toy Story 3," "The Twilight Saga: Eclipse," "Inception," "Alice in Wonderland" and " Iron Man 2 " were the five most discussed.
The iPad and iPhone 4 accounted for over 25 million posts this year, making it the fourth most buzzed about status update trend.
The Jan. 12 earthquake in Haiti also hit Facebook. In fact, within one minute of the 7.0-magnitude earthquake's strike, status updates started rolling in, Backstorm said.
"With the infrastructure in Haiti badly damaged, many of the first reports were from people in the nearby Dominican Republic (where earthquake is "terremoto"), who felt the powerful quake at a distance," Backstorm said. "Firsthand reports peaked four minutes after the quake hit, at a rate of 120 a minute. It took another couple of hours for the world to learn of the disaster, and a day later people on Facebook were discussing it at a peak rate of 1,800 posts per minute."
Other popular mentions included Justin Bieber (No. 6); games on Facebook, such as FarmVille (No. 7), Mineros/Miners (No. 8); Airplanes – not only for travel reasons, but thanks to the popular song "Airplanes" by B.o.B.; and, of course, mentions of 2011.
"References to 2011 showed a big spike on Jan. 1, 2010, as people took the new year as an opportunity to look ahead another full year," Backstorm said. "As the date approaches, mentions have steadily increased, as people make more and more plans for the coming year."