Ryan Deal is a social media and creative advertising lover who’s got an eye for good design and a passion that won’t quit. He runs the website TopCultured.com, which can also be found on Twitter.

It’s nearly Halloween again and you know what that means: candy, costumes, and carving pumpkins. This year, social media has taken the world by storm with huge acquisitions, traditional media recognition, and thanks to Twitter, news at lightning speed. What better way to pay homage to social media than via a carved pumpkin? We’ve compiled 12 great social-media-inspired pumpkins to get some ideas flowing.

Feel free to share your favorites and your own ideas in the comments below.

1. Fail Whale Pumpkin







Twitter's frequent bouts of downtime, though less frequent in recent months, have almost become part of the expected user experience for the site, and their iconic "fail whale" has become part of pop culture.

Source: Scott B. on Flickr

2 & 3. Firefox and IE Pumpkins







Firefox recently won our web browser faceoff against Google Chrome rather handily, so we can understand why someone would want to make a Firefox pumpkin. But why spend time carving an Internet Explorer pumpkin? On the other hand, IE is pretty scary...

Source: CyberNet News

4. Digg Pumpkins







You have to be a real fanatic to carve not just a pumpkin homage to Digg, but one that includes the likenesses of Diggnation hosts Alex Albrecht and Kevin Rose, as well. Still, these two are very impressive, if a little creepy for their stalker qualities.

Source: Tutorialized

5. Reddit Pumpkins







Reddit's mascot really lends itself to Halloween. The cute little alien character looks great on a pumpkin, as these two prime examples above illustrate.

Source:Robert Balousek and inecather on Flickr

6. RSS Pumpkin







Even though some people think that RSS is dying and social media is usurping its role in the way we discover and consume news, RSS is still the dominant method that most of us use to keep on top of web site updates. Many people use RSS without even knowing it, via personal aggregator sites like MyYahoo! or iGoogle.

Source: jsiarto on Flickr

7. Apple Pumpkin







Apple has had one heck of a year. They released a new phone, the iPhone 3G S that comes with a built in video camera, and then proceeded to sell 7.4 million iPhones in the last quarter. Oh, and there are these persistent rumors that this tablet computer thing is in the works, too.

Source: RipFire on Flickr

8. Android Pumpkin







The 2.0 version of Google's free and open source mobile operating system is on its way, and with it the Motorola Droid, which many feel will be the first phone to really potentially challenge the iPhone's smartphone dominance. Like Reddit's, Android's mascot looks pretty great adorning a pumpkin.

Source: David Watson on Flickr

9. WordPress Pumpkin







WordPress won 87% of the vote in our faceoff with TypePad for blogging platform supremacy. 'Nuff said.

Source: Eric M Martin on Flickr

10. Plaxo Pumpkin







Plaxo hasn't been in the news too much lately, but their Plaxo Pulse software remains a good social stream aggregator and content sharing platform.

Source: Plaxo on Flickr

11. Threadless Pumpkin







It's a great Internet success story: two guys take a couple hundred bucks and build a multi-million dollar t-shirt empire by relying on crowdsourced designs and customer voting. And this year they launched Twitter Tees, giving us a reason to like them even more.

Source: cshimala on Flickr

12. Obama Pumpkin







The Barack Obama campaign's groundbreaking use of social media and the web likely helped propel him to the White House last year, and his historic inauguration broke all sorts of records on the Internet. For those reasons, an Obama-themed pumpkin is also inherently a social media pumpkin.

Source: Darkchild

Header image courtesy of iStockphoto, Kameleon007