As 2009 sneaks its way into the annals of history, many are taking this time of year to join for the holidays or reflect on the year that was. As the most measurable, social year in human history, the tools of 2009 showed us how fast something can catch on, who is talking about what and how small the world has become. In that spirit, we have created some data visualizations to show how Christmas buzz is taking shape and what products are being talked about on the web.
Christmas, though confined to a day or two in December, is a buzz term all year long, with an escalation of thousands per day starting in the Fall and ratcheting up to a fever pitch as the holiday grows closer. Though we haven’t seen the full spike mature yet, tweets containing either the term “xmas” or “Christmas’ are now nearing 20,000 per hour or over 300 per minute.
Compare this to last year when we showed a very similar graph and tweets for “Christmas” were topping out at 40k per day and you’ll get a sense of how much Twitter has exploded in 2009.
Since November 1, Google News is showing 111,493 new results and a massive 106 million new blog results for the term “Christmas”, driven in part by the indexing of tweets, as the search giant makes a meaningful move into the real-time future.
3. Christmas in Photos and Video
As the social web matured this year, photo and video sharing has become second nature to many. With more smartphones and applications making this type of engagement possible, expect to see these sectors flourishing in 2010. Notice below, videos tagged “Christmas” on YouTube pushed the video portal to its public API return max for a tag to 1 million by mid-December.
President Obama is one of the most talked about people on Twitter year round, but in this season, he and Santa duel for prominence in the public’s mind.
In the epic battle of love vs. hate, there is a clear winner on Twitter this holiday season.
6. Location-Based Tweets in NYC
An important trend for 2010, as recently described by Pete Cashmore, is location-based social networking. And in the spirit of special sharing, here is a new feature set we at Wiredset are rolling out with Trendrr for the very first time: Data surrounding “check-ins” on Foursquare. Here’s a sample look at possible holiday activity in the Big Apple, as shown in “check-ins” per day.
And where are the “Twitterati” spending their shopping time? This graph, first shown by Jennifer Van Grove in a piece on Black Friday, shows how the rest of the heavy shopping season buzz panned out -- with Amazon staying on top of giant retailers on Twitter.
Here is a look at Twitter buzz for two personal devices that captured America’s attention, harnessed imagination, and drove innovation in 2009. To put the buzz in perspective, most TV shows get less than 5,000 tweets per week. This shows the conversation levels per day.
With an average of over 100 million blog results returned for a typical Google search, iPhone is clearly the hottest blog topic in the smartphone category. Here’s a look at some others in the blog space.
10. Video Games
The multi-billion dollar gaming industry is here to stay and will be a staple this holiday season in many homes. You can see the peaks driven by a flurry of new game announcements this fall, followed by a look at how new games are fairing on Amazon.
Every year there is a product that comes out of nowhere to become a must-have for the kiddos. This year the Zhu Zhus -- robotic hamsters -- are the new entrant making waves in the children’s category. Even with a consumer group contending parts of the anatomy to be unsafe in early December, the fuzzy robots have made their mark on consumers this year.
12. The 12 Days of Christmas Tweets
Most know the song, but few can remember all the words to "The 12 Days of Christmas." The first five days of Christmas are the most talked about on Twitter. Here is a look at them all.
