Inaugural Oddities, Part I

Even more than the first family's outfits and the Chief Justice's bungling of the oath of office, online America has been talking about the impact new media and social media have had on the way we experienced this inauguration. For two days, people have been talking about:

1. The sensational inauguration images made possible by the Photosynth application on MSNBC, which made it possible to browse your way around, zoom in and out of, and change the focal plan of images:

2. The "mindblowing numbers" Facebook and CNN released for their live streaming partnership today, which allowed Facebook users to provide live commentary on the CNN feed. According to Mashable, by 11:34 a.m. CNN:

-had served 13.9 million live video streams globally since 6am
-had broken its all time total daily streaming record (from Election Day) of 5.3 million live streams.

Facebook reported that as of 1:15 pm,

1. 600,000 status updates were posted through the CNN.com Live Facebook feed
2. Facebook averaged 4,000 status updates per minute during the broadcast
3. 8,500 status updates were posted during the first minute of Obama’s speech
4. “Millions” of people logged into Facebook during the broadcast

3. Live streaming -- it failed according to Techcrunch (and my own experience):

Yesterday was supposed to be the day that live Web video streaming took on TV broadcasting. CNN.com alone served a record 21.3 million streams, with a peak of 1.3 million simultaneous streams. And Akamai reported a peak of 5.4 million simultaneous visitors per minute to the various news sites for which it hosts video, and more than 7 million simultaneous streams.

With millions tuning in from their PCs to watch President Obama’s Inauguration speech, it was one of the biggest tests yet for live video streaming. But live streaming failed.

When it comes to big live events with millions of people watching at the same time, traditional TV broadcasters have nothing to worry about. Right now, the Internet breaks at about one million simultaneous streams. That is nothing when it comes to the audience size for historic events, or even a big football game.

I'd intended to watch online, but ended up in front of the living room tv, tweeting from my PDA.

4. Twitter didn't fail. It managed to keep up, sort up.

Twitter reported five times the normal tweet volume. Tweets containing “Obama” hit 35,000 per hour during his speech, and topped 150,000 for the day while @whitehouse_gov jumped on the scene with over 5,000 follows in the first day.

What aspects of the inauguration aren't people talking about? Stay tuned for Inaugural Oddities, part II.

Technorati tags: Barack Obama, Election 2008, old-media-new-media, social media, inauguration