Tomorrow’s our third birthday: What we learned in the past twelve months

A lot of cake. A lot of reasons to celebrate. A lot of big news. In celebration of our birthday tomorrow — we started on January 1, 2009 — we thought we’d share a few anecdotes from the past year. The past twelve months of this silly experiment of telling people the news with big numbers and short blurbs has been a pretty exciting one, and we certainly gained a ton from this year. (In fact, we just hit our 20,000th follower this evening. Whoo!) There were many highlights and lowlights, and we wanted to reflect on a few of those. Hop over to the jump to see them in Summary Sandwich form.

• The year’s biggest story, and what we learned from covering it The Japanese earthquake, and the aftermath it left behind (see Fukushima), set a rough tone for a year loaded with uncertainty all over. One of the year’s most popular posts was this photo.
• Political upheaval and the rise of the wide-scale protest From Egypt and Tunisia to Syria and Yemen, to the day the protests hit home with Occupy, the protester made a great comeback in 2011.
• Politics that made us mad & politics that made us laugh The 2012 election’s never-ending debate cycle gave us a consistently blah frontrunner, some shocking cheers, and a smiling Herman Cain.
• A year full of scandals, both big and small In 2011, the scandal — either Anthony Weiner’s or Herman Cain’s — seemed to rule the news. Then Penn State happened and … wow.
• The people we lost — there were lots of them A crazy year for diplomacy — Osama bin Laden, Muammar Gaddafi and Kim Jong-Il all died. A number of loved figures died too, most notably Steve Jobs.
• A big year for us, but an even bigger year for the social journalist We got to work on lots of great stories in 2011, and sometimes even the big guys noticed. But what really stood out was how the individual journalist got to write the plot this year. That’s awesome.

» What to look forward to in 2012: We’d like to think that we’re just getting started, and we have tons of great things coming down the line. We’re always big fans of taking risks and trying out new ideas and seeing what we can come up with. What would you like to see from us? Shoot us an e-mail. We’d love to hear your thoughts. — Ernie @ SFB