Today Facebook posted its Year In Review for 2012, chronicling the most important and popular events, songs, movies, figures, technology, and locations of the past year. Most of what you see there is what you’d expect: The Hunger Games, Barack Obama, and the term YOLO were all crucially important to humanity’s development over the past twelve months.
But Facebook is also giving the gift of data analysis to its billion+ users, with a personalized Year In Review on everyone’s individual timeline. Just like Twitter did for its Year In Review.
If you visit Facebook.com/yearinreview you’ll quickly see the top 20 moments of your year, though it’s unclear how Facebook is making these decisions.
On my timeline, for example, my status update to “In A Relationship” probably was one of my biggest moments of 2012, but the time that John Biggs hijacked my Facebook account and posted that “i like corn..” was not. In any case, Facebook included them both. From there, users are also able to share the big moments of their year with an easy Share button.
We spoke to Facebook about the personalized Year In Review Timelines, and were told that the idea is to “give people an interactive experience to look back at 2012. People will notice stories they have forgotten about it, which makes it more nostalgic.”
Facebook’s overall top trending lists can be found here. In terms of technology trends, you’ll notice that Facebook snatched up the number one trend of 2012, Instagram.
Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 1 billion monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original...
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