At the beginning of this year Twitter surpassed the 10 billion tweets marks, now 2010 is at its end and 25 billion tweets later Twitter is giving us a window into what the world was talking about on Twitter over the year.

A massive 25 billion tweets was sent during 2010, and out of those 25 billion Twitter has identified the top 10 tweets of 2010 as well as the leading Trends in eight categories: News Events, People, Movies, Television, Technology, World Cup, Sports and Hashtags.

Top 10 Twitter Trends of 2010

1. Gulf Oil Spill
2. FIFA World Cup
3. Inception
4. Haiti Earthquake
5. Vuvuzela
6. Apple iPad
7. Google Android
8. Justin Bieber
9. Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows
10. Pulpo Paul

Its clear that South Africans made their mark in the social sphere with the Word Cup and Vuvuzela being in the top 10 Twitter trends of 2010.

For a comprehensive list of Twitter trends for 2010 broken up in categories visit the Top Twitter Trends in 2010 website.

For long there was no real statistics about local Twitter usage except for where we ranked in the world, but a company called Fuseware has changed that.

Fuseware has profiled millions of tweets and thousands of local Twitter users during March and April 2010 to help us better understand the local South African Twitter user.

According to Fuseware there are 55000 active Twitter users in South Africa with about 1.5 million tweets being sent each month. Twitter is currently South Africa’s 7th most visited site with 4.5% of all local sites referencing content from Twitter.

South African Twitter users mostly tweet during 7AM and 12PM daily and also at night between 7 and 8PM. The most popular days to tweet is Tuesdays and Fridays with weekends being less active than during the week.

Most of South African Twitter users are located in Cape Town with Johannesburg following closely. It is clear that tweeting is confined to developed cities and Information Technology hubs, while users in cities like Pretoria, East London and Port Elizabeth does not take that much interest in the social networking platform.

For a detailed presentation on the state of the South African Twittersphere check out the Fuseware South African Twitter Report here.

You can follow me on Twitter here.

When twitter introduced its geolocation functionality to the world everybody was wondering what it would be useful for, now the answer is here.

Twitter recently started to roll out its new local trends functionality to new users day by day and today I just got my local trends activated. What local trends does is make use of twitter’s geolocation functionality to see what twitter users are tweeting about in specific areas. This will enable you to see whats trending in your area and not just the whole world.

Unfortunately the local trends currently does not have any South Africa cities to choose from, but twitter clearly states the following: “Don’t see your location? We’re working on it.”

Follow me on twitter here or check out TweSMS my new twitter to SMS notification system if you are on twitter.