On #TransformationTuesday, Change Trends Online

Twitter fans have found a niche topic for Tuesdays, after successful #FollowFriday (#FF) and #ThrowbackThursday (#TBT) -- and it's all about personal growth, evolution and change. #TransformationTuesday is a hashtag venue for people to share funny and/or nostalgic before and after pictures of themselves, people around them or their environment. As it is done, the first photo shows people when they were still young (or a past event), while the second shows what they look like now or how things have changed through the years. Many of the tweets showed photos of people with their high school friends or hometown neighbors, together with now-grown-up pictures with the very same people at the same spot or positions after decades have passed. Memes also surfaced of celebrities before and after they became famous. There also those showing athletes playing in their Little League teams with an after photo showing them joining professional games.

Here's how the latest hashtag run performed, peaking at 5,500 tweets per hour and reaching a total of 42,700 tweets in just 24 hours. The hashtag #TransformationTuesday became widely popular because it encourages people to look back and reflect on what they done so far with their lives. Some posts were funny, such as a cat taking a bath, a "before" nerd photo followed by a transformation into a high school cheerleader, and weight loss before and after pictures. Some were not too transformation and took the existential road, saying that some things in their lives remained the same despite the years. Other poked fun at themselves. #TransformationTuesday is a recurring trend because it delves on the human experience and injects feeling, emotion and humanity into a digital space as social media and micro-blogging. It is a great venue for people from everywhere to come together and share snippets of their past to the world.