Twitter unveiled a look back at some of the most talked about events, most re-tweeted posts, and more of 2012. PC Mag pointed to some of the highlights of the report:
President Obama's election night "Four more years" victory tweet featuring a photo of him hugging the First Lady (below) remains the most re-tweeted message of the year. It also broke a record for most retweets ever last month. Popstar Bieber, meanwhile, came in second to the president with a goodbye tweet to a young fan who passed away from brain cancer in September.
In a section dubbed the "Pulse of the planet," Twitter took stock of the events that prompted the biggest conversations this year. Not surprisingly, the Summer Olympics were very popular, generating 150 million tweets.
"The closing ceremonies (specifically, the Spice Girls' performance) amassed the largest Games-related spike, 116,000+ Tweets per minute," Twitter said. "The largest competition-related conversation: when Jamaica's Usain Bolt (@UsainBolt), most-discussed athlete, won gold in the 200m sprint (80,000 Tweets per minute)."
Other sporting events that grabbed people's attention included the Super Bowl (13.7 million tweets), the Euro 2012, and the UEFA Champtions League semi-final.
Election Day, meanwhile, prompted more than 31 million tweets, while Superstorm Sandy generated more than 20 million, with many of those messages including the word "donate." The debate over the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) - which resulted in a one-day Internet blackout - also had people up in arms on the micro-blogging site.
There is plenty more that you can see for yourself in the report. In addition to providing stats about the platform overall, they also teamed up with Vizify to let users visualize their own year on Twitter. All users need to do is visit Vizify's website, click the "Get Yours Now!" link, and sign in with their Twitter account to have an infographic produced that highlights the users most talked-about tweets, and how many responses they created.