The Year in Tweets

Dec. 15, 2010 -- You are what you tweet. So what does Twitter's list of the "10 Most Retweeted Tweets of the Year" reveal about us?

That we like music. A lot. And we like to laugh.

A full seven out of the 10 most retweeted tweets -- tweets that Twitter users quote in their own stream -- are by musicians. They range from affirming (Lady Gaga: "I'm beautiful in my way, 'cause God makes no mistakes") to mildly provocative (Kanye West: "I'm sorry Taylor") ... to Justin Bieber (Rihanna: "Justin Bieber flashed me his abs in the middle of the restaurant" and Joe Jonas: "I cry because I love Justin Bieber!!!").

Three of the 10 were just plain funny. Rounding out the list is an unprintable witticism by the hilariously profane Sh*tMyDadSays, the first-ever Twitter-to-TV stream. In September, a parody al Qaeda stream -- with Osama bin Laden as its avatar -- tweeted "Just noticed Twitter keeps prompting me to 'add a location to your tweets.' Not falling for that one."

The most retweeted tweet of the year? Stephen Colbert's scathing riff on the BP oil spill: "In honor of oil-soaked birds, 'tweets' are now 'gurgles.'"

In all, an astonishing 25 billion tweets were sent in 2010, according to Twitter. It's hard to imagine what the cumulative impact of all that keyboard tapping -- whether inane or enlightened -- may be. Earlier in the week, Twitter summed up what it considered the "10 Most Powerful Tweets of 2010" -- a slightly less quantifiable quality than raw popularity. Some of these were predictably political: the White House welcoming Russian President Medvedev to Twitter, the Prince of Wales' private office announcing Prince William's engagement to Kate Middleton.