I tweet therefore I am

I noted a “tweet” today that expressed pleasure at how quickly Obama’s administration had taken over the official website whitehouse.gov. At exactly 12:01 p.m. in Washington, the new era went live with an inaugural blog post from Macon Phillips, the White House’s director of new media.

But I doubt that the President’s staff had a choice. Everyone is a technomaniac these days and people would have been all a-Twitter had the online element of the government not been quick on the uptake.

The inauguration prompted a surge of activity on Tuesday, with more than one million users updating their status on social networking addiction, Facebook. Facebook averaged over 4,000 status updates per hour Tuesday morning, peaking at 8,500 updates each minute of President Barack Obama’s inaugural speech.

“We’ve never reached levels like this before,” a spokesman told CNN.com. “Even just yesterday, we had more users online than we’ve ever had before, more new users than we’ve ever had before.”

Partnering with CNN, Facebook enabled members watching inaugural festivities via CNN.com to sign in and update their statuses alongside the streaming video provided by the cable news channel.

Twitter also reported a frantic increase of activity in 140 characters or less, blogging, “We saw 5x normal tweets-per-second and about 4x tweets-per-minute…Exciting!”

According to PC World there didn’t seem to be a lot of Bush fans tweeting on channel #inaug,
7:34 a.m: dwhite21787 says, “Pity it’s so cold. 2M people mooning Bush as he flies off would be spectacular.”

About 11 a.m., kate_the_great: “I wonder what Bush and Obama are talking about in the limo right now. Fly fishing? Good DC restaurants? Raising daughters?”

About 11:30 a.m., noreaster: “I doubt I will ever be [in] a crowd like this again.”

About 11:30, crazywanda: “Need a doctor in blue section some1 passed out ppl yelling for medic.”

About 11:45, starweaver: “Okay tears are coming now.”

Article by Miss Pigelle

Tags: barack obama, blogging, social networking, tweets, twitter, whitehouse

This entry was posted on Friday, January 23rd, 2009 at 6:47 pm and is filed under Australian Literature. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.