Facebook Releases 2009 Trends

Facebook has followed Bing, Google, Twitter and YouTube’s leads by releasing some of the trending data for the last year, and some of the conclusions we might draw from it paint Facebook users in a fairly unfavourable light.

Trending data seems to be all the rage as this year comes to a close, with various different web services practically falling over themselves in an attempt to push out as accurate a statistical breakdown of our lives on the web as possible. If YouTube’s taught us anything, it’s that most of us will watch just about anything, and if Facebook’s list of trends[http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=215076352130] for this year teaches us anything, it’s that 2009 was a fairly selfless year.

According to Facebook, the top trending topics this year were:

1. Facebook Applications
2. FML
3. Swine Flu
4. Celebrity Deaths
5. Family
6. Movies
7. Sports
8. Health Care
9. FB
10. Twitter
11. Years
12. Lady Gaga
13. Yard
14. Religion
15. I

YouTube to Get “Sports Hub”

YouTube has announced that it plans to expand its video offering by introducing what it’s calling a “Sport Hub” in a new partnership with SportAccord, a group representing 104 different sports bodies.

We’re used to YouTube announcing these kinds of moves directly on its blog, but this time word comes from the Telegraph of the move to introduce more sports content to YouTube. Perhaps most interesting is the fact that it seems YouTube intends to create a dedicated sport section, which is something it seems to have resisted so far.