Last night there was one big bright shiny star in the midst of the breaking news and its name is Twitter.
- Twitter is where I heard first that there would be rare late-night press briefing from the White House.
- Twitter is where the rumors gained speed that the press briefing concerned Bin Laden
- Twitter is how I managed to stay connected to the situation as people shared live feeds for various news organizations, and stories as reports leaked.
- Twitter burst into dark humour overdrive and deep political debate — profane to profound — all at once and for two hours was a crazy constant stream of infotainment.
- Twitter managed to stay live throughout it all, fail-whale free.
(Twitter is also where the whole operation was live-blogged by accident by @ReallyVirtual, who lives in Abbottabad! For those paying attention, Twitter was full of details through the day.)
And on Monday May 2nd, the Canadian Government has decreed that “thou shall not tweet” about the election until polls have closed across the country. While I’ve never really thought about the blackout as being a bad thing (or a good thing), I wonder how it will/can be enforced. I’ll be checking tweettheresults.ca before the polls close (though I intend to vote when the polls open) just to see if Twitter shines or fades in the face of bureaucracy.
Edit to add this great graphic showing Twitter traffic last night — peak was over 5000 tweets (posts) per second:
