A couple at the Phillies-Mets game last night check their phones for OBL news. (screen shot from ESPN)
One of my Facebook friends wrote this last night at 9:53 p.m. CDT:
Now, I got my news of bin Laden's death the very old fashioned way, via the radio, but a lot of people got the news via social media. Twitter led the way, peaking at an astonishing 5,100 tweets per second at one point during the hours of 9:45 p.m. CDT to 1:20 a.m. CDT. I imagine that Facebook was pretty busy too, people linking the early news stories and posting status changes. Facebook set records when the birth certificate was released for number of status updates in a time period; that may have been a very short lived record.
Now, I got my news of bin Laden's death the very old fashioned way, via the radio, but a lot of people got the news via social media. Twitter led the way, peaking at an astonishing 5,100 tweets per second at one point during the hours of 9:45 p.m. CDT to 1:20 a.m. CDT. I imagine that Facebook was pretty busy too, people linking the early news stories and posting status changes. Facebook set records when the birth certificate was released for number of status updates in a time period; that may have been a very short lived record. Smart phones, with their ability to surf the internet, and email and SMS news alerts sent to those smart phones also enabled people to receive the news with astonishing speed. It would have been very difficult to escape any hint of news with regard to bin Laden's demise.
Boy times have changed, haven't they?
A word of caution: While searching for stuff on this post, I ran across several articles like this one from PC Magazine about scammers using both this news and the Royal Wedding as ways to insert malware into unsuspecting users computers. Be careful what you click on!
2 comments:
T.O.:
Thank God I'm not into this whole "social-networking" (aka big brother is watching you) thing...yet.
(aside from the Internet)
I don't need to know ALL that much and certainly NOT all at once.
I can wait a few nanoseconds here and there...lol.
Stay safe out there.
Bob G:
Yeah, I'm not wholly in it either. I'm pretty deep but I am at my time and processing limit for information flow.
As to big brother? I have conceded that he has been watching for a while. Watch the ads while you surf the net--they will be strangely in harmony with your browsing history. It creeped me out the first time I noticed it. As to locators on cell phones? Unless you disable the feature or the phone is off/battery dead, the phone companies can find you. Even non smart phones.
Face to face is the only way to assure that no one is listening in!
The Observer
PS: Sometimes I post (gasp) more than once in a day, so don't forget to scroll down...would want any of my readers to miss anything. Ha!
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