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Twitter's best tweets of 2011

Every year, Twitter compiles a year-in-review to recap what the company believes were the most important tweets.

Twitter's best tweets of 2011

Over 100 million people around the world log in to Twitter every day to tweet about everything from their daily commutes to the meals they eat, but many have used the social networking tool this year to share important events with people who could be thousands of miles away.

Every year, Twitter compiles a year-in-review to recap what the company believes were the most important tweets. They highlight the “best” according to the level of “impact, resonance, and relevance”, and take into account the big stories that first broke on Twitter by people looking to share a photo, a thought, or a moment in time with people they may never meet, ABC News reports.


1. "Welcome back Egypt #Jan25"
Wael Ghonim, a marketing manager at Google who became a symbol of the revolutionary movement, was held in captivity for nearly 12 days by the Egyptian government under Hosni Mubarak for organizing protests. 

2. "Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event)"
 A local man in Abbottabad, Pakistan unknowingly live-tweeted the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound before any news agency broke the story of the terrorist's death on May 1.

3. "my daughter her name is sarah m. rivera"
A homeless man called Daniel Morales living in New York was reunited with his daughter after years apart after his first, single tweet.
In February, Puerto Rican-born Morales was given the use of a prepaid mobile phone through an organisation called Underheard, which helps give a voice to homeless people.
Morales used the phone to set up a Twitter account and tweet: “my daughter her name is sarah m rivera.” He also posted a photograph of his daughter aged 16 and, later, his number. Sarah, now 27, called him the next day.

4. "This lockout is really boring..anybody playing flag football in Okc..I need to run around or something!"
During this year’s standoff between the basketball players in the US’s NBA and the sport’s authorities over money, Kevin Durant, 23, a forward with the Oklahoma City Thunder, was just itching for a bit of competitive sport. So, in October, he asked if anyone fancied a game of non-contact American Football. A university student in the city responded and, a few hours later, the basketballer, one of the superstars of the NBA, turned up to play.

5."Brooms up London!"
After riots in the U.K. dirtied the streets this August, people rallied on Facebook and Twitter to organise a massive clean-up effort in the affected areas. An account on Twitter called @riotcleanup gained over 70,000 followers and brought together those who wanted to help.

Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".

Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July.

It rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with over 300 million users as of 2011, generating over 300 million tweets and handling over 1.6 billion search queries per day.

It is sometimes described as "the SMS of the Internet".

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