Topsy: Instant social insight

Topsy indexes and ranks over 250 million tweets every day along with all public posts from Google+, in realtime. As the end of the year approaches, we’ve leveraged our search and ranking capabilities to list the top, most relevant socially shared videos and photos from 2011 on Twitter.

Over the course of this past year, there were 292 million tweets to 251 million images, and 126 million tweets to 70 million videos. A breakdown by hosting is included in the tables at the end of this post. That’s a lot of images and videos to go through, and we used Topsy’s search engine to go through all of them in seconds to get a ranked list of the top images and videos by relevance: the number of tweets to each image or video, weighted by the Topsy influence of each tweeter.

When reviewing the top photos and videos that shaped 2011, it’s clear why Time Magazine chose The Protester as the person of the year. What better way to revisit some of this year’s most impactful global events than through the eyes of the people themselves. To compile this list, we took the relevant photos and videos as ranked by Topsy’s search engine, filtered out posts from professionals such as news organizations, and removed multiple posts for the same significant event. This allowed us to produce a list that best reflects the impact of social media – images taken from people on the ground, spread rapidly through social networks, shaping and reflecting the events of 2011.

Enjoy!

PHOTOS (with tweet counts)

- Post London Riots clean up volunteers (19k)

Post Japan earthquake crack (13k)

Louise Macabitas’s UC Davis Pepper Spray photo (11k)

NASA launch (10k)

Shooting star from Perseids Meteor Shower taken from space (9,014)

Composite image of Obama on birth certifate & Bin Laden (6,826)

Christchurch, NZ post earthquake (3,892)

Sticky notes for Steve Jobs (3,823)

Tahrir Square (3,209)

Occupy Oakland; woman in wheel chair, gassed (2,969)

Russian Protesters in a paddy wagon after being arrested (2,482)

Oslo bomb (2,425)

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Egypt protests (2,345)

FDNY celebrating Osama Bin Laden’s death (2,088)

London riots (1,961)

Debt Crisis sign (1,175)

Protests at night in Greece (540)

UC Davis Quad (439)

Joe Paterno (476)

Occupy Wall Street at foot of Brooklyn Bridge; (254)

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VIDEOS (with number of tweets)

What’s Going on… (95K)  What’s Going On…

The Force: Volkswagen Commercial (65K)  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R55e-uHQna0

Steve Jobs’s Stanford Address (44k)  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc

Woman scolding rioters in London (41K)  http://www.twitvid.com/4JTZH

Blackberry not working (38k)  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAG39jKi0lI

Dog Tease (33k)  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGeKSiCQkPw

Cats, kittens (29k)  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vw4KVoEVcr0

Jack Sparrow Feat. Michael Bolton (spoof) (28k)  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GI6CfKcMhjY

Talking twin babies (28k)  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JmA2ClUvUY

In addition to specific top media content produced by people on the street, we compiled figure from 2011 showing the number of photos/videos by hosting site referenced by tweets along with the total number of tweets including links to these sites.

Break down of photos posted and tweets by hosting site:

Break down of videos posted to video sites

2011 was indeed the start of mass consumer reporting using multi-media to share vivid imagery of events as they were occurring. As the use of social media and mobile devices continue to proliferate across the globe we expect consumer reporting to dramatically increase in 2012. News organizations, businesses and consumers will require ways to effectively search and identify the most important social content, and we at Topsy Labs look forward to continuing to fulfill this need with our technology as we head into the New Year.

Posted by jenna