2009 was, without question, a great year for Twitter, the year that will be remembered as the year they "went mainstream" around the world. With one of the fastest-growing userbases in social networking, the future is bright for the microblogging platform. Just what that future is going to look like is fairly accurately reflected in the top Twitter trends of 2009 - because what those trends tell us about how people use Twitter and what the future has in store for the microblogging platform is a bit bleak.

Let's take a look at the top Twitter trends of 2009, according to Twitter's recent blog post on the Twitter blog post on the top Twitter trends of 2009.

Yeah, it's like that. Let's do a quick breakdown on what all of this means:

1. Iran's disputed election was huge on Twitter in 2009.

Dominating the "News Events" category, Iran's disputed presidential election and the following unrest, which was both documented and organized via Twitter, was the talk of 2009. Although the results of the presidential election eventually held, the world watched for weeks as Iran's population took to the streets to protest and documented it all in 140 characters or less.

2. When it comes to celebrities, Twitter users are just as vacuous as real people.

A quick glance down the "People" list will read pretty-much like an episode of TMZ. When it comes to Twitter, the people that people seem to like to talk about are the same people that people seem to like to talk about anywhere else. Big surprise there - we've already discussed the sad truth about Twitter's top users so we're not overly shocked.

3. The most popular use of hashtags is to start mass-participation games like "I wish" and "Remember when."

Hashtags, originally created to help organize and aggregate conversations on a particular topic or event, are most often used in mass-participation "games" where users try to think of a clever and funny tweet on the topic. For example, the "#rememberwhen" hashtag tracked people reminiscing (and griping) about the old days.

4. Twitter's research team doesn't get out enough, 'cause they think True Blood is a movie.

What's up with that?

One caveat about this list - I don't like how they did it. For example, Iran, Tehran and #iranelection are all considered separately under "News Events," although they're all referring to the same overall event. With other categories, such as "People," they've combined multiple search terms; for example, when they say "Michael Jackson" they are also counting tweets with "MJ" or "Jacko." Had they done so with the "News Events" category, we probably would have seen #iranelection at #1 and would have seen a lot more topics up there on the list besides Iran.