It's easy to look at total traffic and sales figures, but those reports are best left to the experts. Instead, I've focused on the major landmarks in the 2011 calendar - the New Year sales, Easter and Christmas, along with the impact of the Royal Wedding in April.
Beyond that, I've picked out a few personal highlights of how the major players in the social networking sphere have performed in Google's search statistics over the course of the year.
All of the data is from Google Trends, which means there are no gross estimates of search query volumes - in all cases, the figures below are relative to the full-year average number of queries received by the search terms listed, or of one of the terms in charts comparing the performance of multiple queries.
