Tech blog: Egypt and Charlie Sheen come out top in 2011’s Twitter trends

From the death of Elizabeth Taylor to the uprising in Egypt and the nonsensical ramblings of Charlie Sheen, the list of the hot Twitter topics of 2011 gives a skewed but interesting retrospective on the news events of the past 12 months.

The list of trending names and subjects was revealed by the micro-blogging service this week as part of its annual review of what the estimated 300 million tweeters around the world are talking about.

While it is hardly surprising that #Egypt was 2011’s most popular hashtag (the means by which tweets are grouped together), it says a lot about the demographic involved that #tigerblood - a self-referential term coined by troubled actor Sheen during one of his many offbeat media appearances earlier this year - charts in second place.

The lists of most popular names is filled mostly by American stars and flash-in-the-pan celebrities like Rebecca Black, but Scottish singer-songwriter Gerry Rafferty, who died in January aged 63, was the fourth most popular in music. Gil Scott-Heron, the politically-charged American musician and poet who passed away in May, was one spot below Rafferty.

Indeed, celebrity deaths - and their associated rumours - always cause quite a stir on Twitter due to the website’s fast-paced immediacy, a fact which meant that Hollywood legend Elizabeth Taylor was the most tweeted-about actress of 2011.

Twitter is widely seen as one of the fastest breaking news platforms and a reliable barometer of global public interest. It lists its top story of the year as the resignation of Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak, followed in second place by the US raid which killed Osama Bin Laden.

The other stories which got people tweeting included the Japanese tsunami and resuling nuclear meltdown in March, the shooting of US congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in January and the death of Libyan ruler Colonel Gaddafi in October.

The full list of hot topics is available on the Twitter blog.

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