With 2011 now over, it’s been a wild ride here at MakeUseOf – so I thought it might be interesting to take a look back at the most popular articles of 2011. What stories did you appreciate so much you just had to share it with friends, or really got you talking? Read on to find out!

(Stats were compiled from a combination of number of comments and total social share counts)

• How to Enable Facebook’s New Timeline Profile Before Anyone Else: Mark was quick on the case with this quick and dirty little hack that involved signing up as a developer  - now officially rolled out to everyone.
• 4 Things To Do When Your Facebook Account is Hacked: Keep Tina’s tips bookmarked in case it ever happens to you.
• Add Nyan Cat To Your Progress Bars: Also taking the award for the most useless tutorial published on MakeUseOf, Justin showed us all how the cute rainbow poptart feline (with accompanying soundtrack) could be embedded into the very core of Windows.

• How to Check if Someone Else Is Accessing Your Facebook Account: It’s another Facebook security article, with this simple way to check if you’re being hacked! Thanks Steve!
• 8 Free Tools To Visualize Information on Twitter: Nancy knows that a long list of tweets isn’t always the best way to look at Twitter, so check out some of these tools to really understand what’s going on. Or don’t, because Twitter’s mostly noise anyway, according to me.
• Facebook’s New Way of Using You As Free Advertising (And How to Stop It): Tim isn’t a fan of Facebook advertising, especially now that things you’ve liked will be paired to advertisers and shown to your friends.
• 9 Easy Ways to Never Get a Virus: Some of us just never get viruses, and don’t waste money and computing resources on virus scanners either – and it’s down to these 9 easy preventative steps.

• 5 Cool Twitter Search Tricks to Monitor What People are Saying About You: While I severely doubt anyone is talking about me on Twitter, if you have a brand or company like Nancy does and want to keep track of social opinion and reactions, you’d be well advised to try these awesome tips out.
• 5 Things You Need to Stop Posting on Facebook:in which Joshua makes a case for not wanting to see your holiday snaps, vague messages about unspecified people, chain letters, or location updates.
• 55 Geeky One Line Jokes: Tina has scoured the Internet so you could get 15 minutes of laughter geeky laughter. Featuring such classics as “Microsoft is not the answer. Microsoft is the question. NO is the answer.”
• 5 Apps That Let You Video Chat With Facebook Friends: Steve is a Facebook pioneer it seems, and was on top of Facebook video chat well before they officially integrated Skype into Facebook.
• 10 Ways to Update Facebook and Twitter Simultaneously: Though this would be at the top of my own list of things to not post on Facebook, Nancy shows us exactly how to spam your status updates to both Twitter and Facebook!
• Facebook Finally Offers Encrypted Sessions: Did you know anyone on the same network as you (such as public wifi) can easily grab your Facebook password and username? Well, not anymore if you enable Secure HTTP – Tim shows you how.
• 10 Most Disliked YouTube Videos of All Time: Though Facebook has been resolute in not giving us a well needed dislike button, YouTube has had it for ages. Check out Steve’s list of what made YouTube users cry out in pain.

• 5 Tips and Tricks For Avoiding Facebook Phishing Scams: Nancy shows you how to avoid the new scourge of phishing scams, this time targeting your Facebook data.
• How to Turn Off the Photo Viewer in Facebook: If the lightbox style photo viewer isn’t to your fancy, Nancy has you covered with these 5 methods to deal with it.
• How To Create an iPhone or Android App Without Any Coding Skills: Bakari shows us a few fantastic tools to turn your app ideas into a reality. What are you waiting for?
• 5 Xbox Kinect Hacks That’ll Blow Your Mind: A year ago I highlighted some of of the fantastic projects that people have hacked together on the Kinect platform.
• 8 Reasons Why I Switched to A Mac: Possibly the most controversial post of the year, in which I outline why the Mac is now my primary computing platform.
• The 5 Most Annoying Things People Do On Twitter: It’s not just Facebook that’s full of rubbish you know, so here’s Dave letting off some steam about what Tweets he just can’t stand.

• 3 Unique and Creative Uses for Dropbox Accounts: Nancy outlines how you can use Dropbox to listen to music, create a portfolio, or even host an entire website. Amazing!
• How To Root Your Android Phone With Super One Click: An essential first step for any new Android owners, Ryan showed you a nice and easy rooting method, though you do need to install a SDK too.
• Install the Release Build of iOS5: though it did mean your iPhone could no longer make phone calls, clearly a lot of people were interested in the latest and greatest iOS. Dave tried his best to help you through your upgrade problems in the comments.
• The 7 Best Powerful Netbook Applications That Don’t Chug System Resources: in which Matt shows exactly how to get the most functionality from an underpowered netbook – but advice that could really be applied to any PC.
• 8 Spectacularly Wrong Predictions About Computer and The Internet: While I’m not adverse to making predictions of my own, Tina finishes off the list by examining some of the more hilariously off-target computing predictions from the last few decades – like this little gem “Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons” – Popular Mechanics, 1949.

That’s all folks! I’d like to take this moment to thank all my fellow writers for making me feel welcome since I joined in December 2010, and for continuing to publish fantastic and useful articles week after week – as well as to all our readers for sticking with us, MakingUseOf our tutorials, and generally being awesome! Stay tuned for ever more fantastic articles, and do let us know in the comments if you had a particular favourite article of 2011!