Facebook has released its 2011 top-shared stories in the United States and it is confirmed—social networking on Facebook is definitely not about hard news, despite footage of the Japanese tsunami near the top of the list.
While there were some serious topics on the Top 40 list—with the death of Steve Jobs taking three entries, and one on the effects of Obama and Bush on the deficit coming in at 18—topics generally range from the cute to bizarre: “Laughing Baby Loves Ripping Paper!” versus “Man robs bank to get medical care in jail.”
Pet stories rated too, with two of the three stories describing mourning dogs. As Deejay Yap comments on the Facebook website: “two grieving dogs in the top 10. no, I didn’t tear up when i read these stories. okay, maybe a little.”
Maybe the third pet story would have cheered Deejay up, or driven him to tear the list up. “China’s latest craze: dyeing pets to look like other wild animals” (CNN) just scraped into the top 40 at 38.
Americans spend roughly a quarter of their time online on social networking sites, according to Nielsen Research, and Facebook is the dominate player, capturing 85 percent of the social networking market in 2010.
While women predominate over men at around 61 percent of Facebook users, ages seem to vary equally with over 70 percent in the 25 to 54 range and no particular ten year range dominating, says online monitor, Social Media.
This may explain why two of the top 25 stories on the list centered on women’s interests: “Why You’re Not Married,” from the Huffington Post and written by a woman, and, again from the Huff, “A Message to Women From a Man: You Are Not ‘Crazy.’”
The stats may also explain why 12 of the stories involved parents and families. The story, “What teachers really want to tell parents,” a CNN feature on how parents are driving teachers from the profession, was the second most shared story of the year.
In a slightly different tone, “Permissive parents: Curb your brats” ranked 28 on the list. And on that note, Chinese mothering also features, twice, with the stories “Notes From a Dragon Mom” and “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior” making it to the top 25 most shared.
Whether this suggests parents spend more time on social networking sites remains to be seen, but either way, the popularity of parent stories on the Top 40 Facebook list does not help explain why three of the top stories—including the third most popular, “No, your zodiac sign hasn’t changed”—concern stories about astrological charts. Or does it?
In terms of serious news, it is noticeable that all the stories came from just six online outlets: CNN with 10, the New York Times with 7, The Huffington Post with 7, Wall Street Journal one, and the Washington Post 3. Yahoo had the most, at 12.
Yahoo, founded in a campus trailer in 1994 by Stanford University Electrical Engineering students David Filo and Jerry Yang, started out seriously as “David’s and Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web,” but was later changed to “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.” While it is generally considered that Yahoo is the acronym for that, Filo and Yang maintain they chose the name because they liked the general definition of a yahoo: “rude, unsophisticated, uncouth.”
In terms of the Facebook 2011 Top 40 shared stories, perhaps Eva Nelson’s comments on the website sum it up: “Something tells me this must be the second list! You really think we believe this garbage! … I’m sure it will go down in history as the year the News media lost their integrity!!!”
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