Image via turtleteeth/Shutterstock
Twitter has released its round-up for 2013 and one Irish man is responsible for one of the most retweeted posts of the year. Meanwhile, Irish users were busy tweeting about Brian O’Driscoll, Vincent Browne and their beloved GAA.
An Ipsos MRBI survey published in September showed that 22pc of the population of Ireland has a Twitter account – that’s one in five people. In 2013, those Twitter users were mostly pre-occupied with tweeting along to episodes of Tonight with Vincent Browne on TV3, following the news of Roma families mistaken as kidnappers and keeping up with the political situation in Syria.
Twitter’s trending lists for Ireland in 2013 show what trended most frequently on the social network throughout the year. Sport forms a huge part of the discussion in online forums and, in Ireland, the favourite topics were rugby star Brian O’Driscoll (BOD) and GAA.
The Irish also started their own uniquely Irish conversations on made-up postcodes for Donegal (“Follow that car behind you” – @DaisyCottageIRL), summing up Ireland in just three words (“Broke. Loaded. Broke” – @RossOCK) and imagining Irish versions of blockbuster films (“Meet the Feckers” – @owenhants).
Year on Twitter
You can check out Twitter’s global highlights from 2013 over on its dedicated Year on Twitter site. Here, you can relive the year’s highs and lows, including US President Barack Obama’s second inauguration, the appointment of the new pope, the Boston Marathon bombings, Margaret Thatcher’s death, Sharknado’s debut, Sir Alex Ferguson’s retirement, the MTV Video Music Awards, the fight for marriage equality in countries around the world, the US government shut-down, the super typhoon in the Philippines, #SFBatkid, the birth of the royal baby, elections and protests worldwide, the year’s major international sporting events and more.
There are also some unique ‘only on Twitter’ moments highlighted, such as the the use of Vine to chronicle the implant of a brain pacemaker by surgeons at UCLA Health; the prime minister of France summoning a cabinet minister via Twitter and then announcing that the minister had been fired; and the Nobel Peace Prize committee contacting its winner – the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons– through Twitter when other methods of communication failed.
The site also notes the year’s ‘Golden Tweets’ – the most retweeted statements on the social network in 2013. These include Lea Michele’s first public comment about the death of her Glee co-star and partner Cory Monteith and actor Paul Walker’s staff’s announcement of his death.
Boy band One Direction were responsible for three of the five most retweeted messages of the year, but it was Mullingar native Niall Horan’s celebration of his 20th birthday that saw the most shares.
Tweeting birds image by turtleteeth via Shutterstock
