The acronym for "hit me up" was this year's biggest surprise. In early 2009, the acronym HMU was virtually unheard of. Only a few posts a day contained HMU, and half of them were probably typos. By May, however, it started to grow slowly and was averaging about 20 posts a day. The volume roughly doubled every month, and by the end of 2009 it had risen to 1,600 posts a day—too modest of a number to be on our radar for last year's list.

However, HMU continued to grow aggressively throughout 2010, increasing by about 75 percent each month. By the end of summer, HMU reached 80,000 mentions per day.

The World Cup was simply the biggest sporting event in 2010, and because of the global presence of Facebook people took to the virtual streets to cheer on their teams and boo their rivals. The start of the games and the finals garnered the most attention, with 1.5 million and 1.3 million mentions, respectively, of "World Cup" and countless more mentions of teams and players. At key moments over the course of the games, as many as 50 percent of all status updates were related to them.

As with last year's list, big movies were much talked about. "Toy Story 3," "The Twilight Saga: Eclipse," "Inception," "Alice in Wonderland" and "Iron Man 2" were the five most discussed (in that order).

Naturally, the people updating their status to report on the movie via their mobile phones were able to do so as soon as it ended, while the people reporting on their computers had to get home first. The difference in the spikes between mobile and web gives us an approximation of how long it takes people to get out of the theater, go home and fire up Facebook—about half an hour.

In May, Apple surpassed long-time rival Microsoft in market capitalization, thanks in large part to two of the most discussed products of the year: the iPad and iPhone 4. These two products combined to account for over 25 million bragging or the occasional condemning posts during the year.

The impact of the Jan. 12 earthquake was widely felt through status updates. Even though most people were far away, they shared the shock, concern and news both among their friends and to the world. One Boston woman was trapped with a group of 36 fellow travelers in Haiti and took to updating her status to find out from her friends what was happening and to let families know the group was safe.

Within one minute of the 7.0-magnitude earthquake's strike, status updates started rolling in. With the infrastructure in Haiti badly damaged, many of the first reports were from people in the nearby Dominican Republic (where earthquake is "terremoto"), who felt the powerful quake at a distance. Firsthand reports peaked four minutes after the quake hit, at a rate of 120 a minute. It took another couple of hours for the world to learn of the disaster, and a day later people on Facebook were discussing it at a peak rate of 1,800 posts per minute.

Bieber Fever struck before 2010, but by all accounts this was a standout year for the 15-year-old pop music star. The surge in mentions continued to grow throughout the year, largely following the rise in his career. He started 2010 with the release in January of his biggest hit, "Baby." His Sept. 12 debut on the MTV Video Music Awards attracted the most mentions of him.

Games are popular applications on Facebook, and references appeared throughout this year's list. The biggest trending phrase was "barn raising." No, there wasn't a mass exodus from cities to the country life among people on Facebook. Instead, they were recruiting their friends to virtual versions of the old-time tradition of a community event to build a new barn. This started when FarmVille launched a barn-raising feature in January. FrontierVille, launched in June, also grew in mentions.

The story of the 33 Chilean miners trapped underground for 69 days captivated the world. People globally watched the truly inspiring story unfold as they were rescued one by one after an unimaginable time underground.

The first one occurred exclusively in Chile in August, when the mine first collapsed and contact with the miners was lost. A week later, the miners were miraculously found alive and the rest of the world started to talk about them a little bit, but the story was still predominantly in Chile. Over the course of the next 60 days, the world watched the trials and tribulations as workers above ground scrambled to drill rescue shafts. When the ordeal finally ended, millions of people posted about it.

Using the word "airplanes" is nothing new or noteworthy—most years. But in 2010, it burst onto the scene in status messages thanks to the catchy lyrics of the international hit song "Airplanes." A deeper look showed that people were specifically quoting the following line, often times to share a personal wish and sometimes when they were traveling.

Similar to last year, people talked frequently about years in their status updates. People are looking forward to big personal events in the coming year—perhaps a wedding or an expectant child. References to 2011 showed a big spike on Jan. 1, 2010, as people took the new year as an opportunity to look ahead another full year. As the date approaches, mentions have steadily increased, as people make more and more plans for the coming year.

Source: Facebook

Networked Blogs enables you to monitor your favorite blogs using Facebook and see new posts appearing in your news stream. You can also use it to promote your own blog to other interested Facebook users, and discover new blogs that your friends enjoy or those that other people with similar interests to yours recommend.

When you start using the application you need to subscribe to at least five blogs, then you can start finding new ones or promoting your own and it has its own subscription as mentioned earlier which helps increasing your blog traffic.It has Twitter support as well, for posting your blog post on twitter automatically.

PuzzleBee suits jigsaw lovers everywhere. Use it to create new jigsaws from your own Facebook photos, or compete against other users to finish the "jigsaw of the day" puzzle in the shortest time.

Unlike other online puzzles, you can rotate pieces as well as move them around, and you can change the number of pieces in each puzzle to alter the level of difficulty. As you complete different puzzles you move up the hierarchy, in a quest to progress from Baby Bee to Queen PuzzleBee.

The DivShare application links your Facebook account to its online storage service, so you can use it to share documents, photos, music and videos with your friends. It enables you to link your files with your profile, or post them on friends' walls.

You can even share them in your news feed. Files can be up to 200MB in size and you can have unlimited storage space on the DivShare servers. You can host anything that meets the terms of service for free, as long as your account lasts, and you don't have to register.

My Flickr enables you to display your Flickr photos and photo sets to your Facebook friends without them leaving Facebook. It's a third-party application, not officially supported by Flickr, and you need to authorise the app in your Flickr account settings.

The application respects your Flickr privacy settings, so only photos you've marked as public will be shown on Facebook. You can also pick shots to showcase your photography on your profile. You can select these from a simple search.

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The free version though has a cap on the amount of files you can upload in a month.It is restricted to 40 MB whereas the premium version allows 500 MB of uploads a month.But despite this it is a very handy service and worth trying out. More so now because Livescribe, a digital smart pen that could well be on every tech enthusiast's wish list, has offered support for Evernote.

Another interesting service that may not offer the level and depth of Evernote but is extremely handy is the Dropbox. It is , as explained by the company's YouTube promotional video, like a magic purse. You just drop all your files into it and rest assured that it is safe residing in the cloud computing servers, for you to download later at your convenience in any device of your choice. It offers up to 2 GB free storage and one could even host a small website entirely out of the Dropbox server.

As far as bookmarks manager, its still the old faithful Delicious. One of the first full fledged bookmarks manager on the cloud. Delicious scores with its simplicity. Get store all your favorite websites and online resources on the cloud, so that you can access them from anywhere. The Delicious plug-in is available for all the browsers, Works best with Mozilla Firefox. Also do note that Xnote is another highly recommended bookmarks manager. But the thing about bookmarks servive is, once you are in, just stick with one service. Better that way.

There are plenty of services that let you connect to multiple IM services under one roof. Nimbuzz is one of the many that has generated positive hype among smartphone users. With one secure login via Nimbuzz, users can chat with friends across all popular IM services. The recent additions include Facebook Connect. Nimbuzz also allows users to make free VoIP calls. Other notable mentions for similar Services include Meebo, Snaptu.