Inauguration winner: Twitter

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Inauguration winner: Twitter

By Joshua Benton

Here’s an interesting set of visualizations. Apparently, during Obama’s swearing-in yesterday, people:

— stopped posting photos to Flickr;

— stopped searching for things on Google;

— stopped fiddling with their music on Last.fm; but

— quadrupled their normal tweeting levels on Twitter.

Now, in each case “stopped” is an overstatement — those first three services merely saw substantial and unusual drops in usage. But it is interesting that at an instant where people were otherwise stepping away from their technological lives to be in the moment, the one thing they still wanted to do was Twitter.

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What was really interesting, since I follow mostly journalists, media outlets, PR folks, and social media marketers on Twitter, was that there was no attempt to ‘record’ the moment, no hashtags in use, but rather a group response to the inauguration speech, with people tweeting the phrases from the speech that resonated with them. It was quite a singular experience for me – like watching it with 250 colleagues and yet able to hear every murmured comment without it interfering with what was happening on the television screen.
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Tags: Flickr, Google, social media, Twitter

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