Inauguration winner: Twitter

By Joshua Benton @jbenton Jan. 21, 2009, 1:56 p.m.

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

— 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.

Joshua Benton is the senior writer and former director of Nieman Lab. You can reach him via email (joshua_benton@harvard.edu) or Twitter DM (@jbenton).

POSTED Jan. 21, 2009, 1:56 p.m.

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