Twitter just released new data about its user interactions from 2012 — all on a brand new website.

The site, 2012.twitter.com, pulls out specific instances of the most retweeted update, the most tweeted events, significant trends, and more. The data more or less matches up with the most popular events from the news cycle, including the 2012 presidential election, the NFL referee strike, and the Olympics. But one interesting thing Twitter did with its report was create a category that represents data that’s more or less unique to the microblogging social network.

The company listed the following categories and explanations:

• Golden Tweets: The top two tweets that generated the most retweets for the year, plus honorable mentions for a few others that caught attention around the world.
• The pulse of the planet: Some of the biggest conversations of the year that generated large numbers of tweets and retweets.
• Only on Twitter: Moments of serendipity and just plain awesomeness (if there is such a thing) are what we call #onlyontwitter. We list examples of tweets that came to life organically on Twitter and can be appreciated in an instant.
• Top trends: Lists of the significant trends of the year in the U.S., UK, and Japan. These phrases reveal what captured our attention based on sudden spike of interest, rather than what was consistently popular.
• New voices: From the Pope to Pelé, this year Twitter welcomed new voices from every corner of the world.

In addition to the year-end report site, Twitter also teamed up with Vizify to provide individual stats on each user. You simply need to plug your information into Vizify to pull up the data, which gives you an overview of your most tweeted-about topics. (In my case, VentureBeat pops up at the top of the list, followed by Netflix and Reddit.)

photo credit: Rosaura Ochoa via photopin cc

Twitter has previously reported moments of unusually high activity, such as pop singer Beyonce’s pregnancy announcement during MTV Video Music Awards, a tense U.S. women’s soccer team game, and Japan’s New Year’s Eve 2010 celebration. The most frequently cited metric Twitter uses during these events is “tweet’s per second” (TPS), which is determined by measuring the number of times the world mentions a specific subjected over the course of a single second in time. Although during President Barack Obama’s address, the company thought it more relevant to use a Tweets per minute (TPM) metric.

According to Twitter’s analysis, the most frequently tweeted minutes included a mention of Education / College Tuition (12,870 TPM) at 9:35 p.m. ET, Innovation / Steve Jobs (13,956 TPM) at 9:38 p.m. ET, and — oddly enough — a joke mentioning “Spilled Milk” (14,131 TPM) at 9:51 p.m. ET.

The core themes mentioned in Tweets during the address included education (35, 972), energy (27,215) and jobs (22,502). Also, Twitter counted 548 total tweets sent by members of congress during the address.

While the data is definitely interesting, I’m more impressed with Twitter’s quick turn around as well as the relevant metrics identified. The company is definitely planning to use its real-time data to show genuine behavior, and the demonstrations presented from the State of the Union address are likely barely scratching the surface.

Following the data results, Vice President Joe Biden announced that he would participate in his first Twitter discussion tomorrow (Jan. 26.), undoubtedly with the aid of a tech-savvy intern or administrative aid.

For a more detailed look at the data, check out the infographic from Twitter embedded below. (Click image to enlarge.)