What did people on Twitter ever talk about before WikiLeaks and its little cousin GawkerLeaks? According to the list of 2010′s top Twitter trends, a lot—from vuvuzelas to the BP oil spill to, of course, Justin Bieber. The company analyzed the 25 billion tweets sent over the year and found that the following ten topics were what kept the world buzzing in 2010.

Pretty much everybody has something to say about WikiLeaks. And for those who like to say those things using only 140 characters, it’s been a bit of a mystery as to why #wikileaks hasn’t become a trending topic. But thanks to swirling rumors on the Internet, that mystery turned into a full-fledged conspiracy theory. This prompted Twitter to use its blog to explain why #wikileaks isn’t trending, despite being one of Twitter’s most-discussed topics.

case study

When The Awl asked “What Were Black People Talking About Last Night?“, which Mediaite’s Robert Quigley called “lazy and, well, casually racist,” one of the things that got lost was an actually interesting question – how do these seemingly random hashtagged trending topics get started?

So we found out.