-The Gulf oil spill, FIFA World Cup, and the movie Inception were the top 3 trending topics on Twitter this year, followed by the Haitian earthquake and the infamous vuvuzela.
On Monday, Twitter released its top trends of 2010.
They do this every year and according to Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, the results are always surprising.
-One of the things that strikes me about these overall trends when you look at things like, you know,
the World Cup is a great example.
I mean, obviously, that's gonna trend.
It highlights the fact that Twitter can-- it just makes the world seem that much smaller.
-The question is how much do these Twitter trends reflect what the rest of America or the rest of the world, for that matter, is thinking.
According to a recent study, only 8% of Americans who are online use Twitter, yet the number of people on Twitter has skyrocketed in the last 2 years.
-If we look at December of 2008, we had about 3 million registered accounts on Twitter, in the whole service
And December of 2010, we now have over 175 million registered accounts and many of those were done in this past year.
-With 65% of accounts being created outside of the United States, Twitter trends reflect a global conversation.
Josh Lowensohn, editor of CNET, explains.
-People love tragedy and they love celebrities and they love lots of both so we're seeing things like the oil spill and Justin Bieber in massive quantities.
-Earlier this year, there were rumors that Twitter had to buy more equipment to handle all of the tweets about Justin Bieber.
Turns out, that was not necessarily true.
-I think we had ongoing measurement called the Bieber Index which we were measuring like, you know, the mentions of Bieber internally but we didn't actually have any separate servers or anything like that.
-Okay.
For CBS News, I'm Natali Morris, CNET.com, in San Francisco.
