Hey, so Obama's sixth State of the Union address was on tonight. Did you watch it? Yeah, don't lie. It's fine, you didn't miss much. At the beginning of the speech he said he wasn't going to just go down a list of proposals for the coming year and then... proceeded to do just that. It's hard to take any of it seriously because, you know, Republican congress and all that.
If you want to know how the speech really did, though, there's only one place you have to look: Twitter.
In all 2.6 million Tweets were sent out starting with President Obama's address, and ending with the Republican response from newly elected Iowa Senator Joni Ernst (she of the infamous castrating hogs commercial), Twitter has revealed in a blog post..
Now 2.6 million isn't bad... but to put in context 306,000 tweets were sent out per minute that time Miley Cryus rubbed her butt on Robin Thicke. That entire Video Music Awards had 11 million tweets. So... yeah, 2,6 million really isn't great.
Twitter also revealed the most tweeted about moments during the speech. They were:
When the President ad-libbed the line, “I have no more campaigns to run. I know because I’ve won both of them.” The line has been described as "epic burn" against the GOP.
The second highest was when the speech was finally over, followed by the President outlining college proposals.
The most-Tweeted about topics during the live telecast were: community college, equal pay, climagte change, tax reform and healthcare.
Twitter wouldn't be Twitter without some sniping from politicians on the other side of the aisle. Here are some of the ones you might be hearing about tomorrow, from both before and after the speech:
The President’s address was a lost opportunity and shows a man out of touch on both domestic and foreign policy. #SOTU
— Lindsey Graham (@GrahamBlog) January 21, 2015
I’ll save you 45 mins. Obama will decry Republicans, beat up on private business and argue for more “free stuff". Your welcome. #SOTU2015”
— Gov. Bobby Jindal (@BobbyJindal) January 21, 2015
#Obama perverts "prosecutorial discretion" by inviting a deportable to sit in place of honor at #SOTU w/1st Lady. I should sit with Alito.
— Steve King (@SteveKingIA) January 20, 2015
This>>> pic.twitter.com/nhokuPvZAT
— Senator Rand Paul (@SenRandPaul) January 21, 2015
Veto threats & unserious proposals may make good political theater, but they won't distract the new American Congress https://t.co/cumheM6Cud
— Speaker John Boehner (@SpeakerBoehner) January 21, 2015
It also wouldn't be Twitter without at least one meme. This year it didn't come from anything Obama said, but rather from a line in Ersnt's speech in which she talked about her rural upbringing.
“You see, growing up, I had only one good pair of shoes. So on rainy school days, my mom would slip plastic bread bags over them to keep them dry,” she said, and Twitter went crazy with #BreadBagShoes.
Check out my new Nikes! #breadbagshoes pic.twitter.com/MTIzvrunYQ
— Steve Dowdy (@Steverocks35) January 21, 2015
Why just #BreadbagShoes, what about the bread? pic.twitter.com/pynLgHLEzt
— JigmeUgen (@JigmeUgen) January 21, 2015
Meanwhile in Iowa #BreadbagShoes #JoniErnst #SOTU #POTUS pic.twitter.com/HTRfYkCShY
— JigmeUgen (@JigmeUgen) January 21, 2015
(Image source: nbcnews.com)
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Twitter is an online information network that allows anyone with an account to post 140 character messages, called tweets. It is free to sign up. Users then follow other accounts which they are interested in, and view the tweets of everyone they follow in their "timeline." Most Twitter accounts are public, where one does not need to approve a request to follow, or need to follow back. This makes Twitter a powerful "one to many" broadcast platform where individuals, companies or organizations can reach millions of followers with a single message. Twitter is accessible from Twitter.com, our mobile website, SMS, our mobile apps for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, our iPad application, or 3rd party clients built by outside developers using our API. Twitter accounts can also be private, where the owner must approve follower requests.
Twitter started as an internal project within the podcasting company Odeo. Jack Dorsey, and engineer, had long been interested in status updates. Jack developed the idea, along with Biz Stone, and the first prototype was built in two weeks in March 2006 and launched publicly in August of 2006. The service grew popular very quickly and it soon made sense for Twitter to move outside of Odea. In May 2007, Twitter Inc was founded.
Our engineering team works with a web application framework called Ruby on Rails. We all work on Apple computers except for testing purposes.
We built Twitter using Ruby on Rails because it allows us to work quickly and easily--our team likes to deploy features and changes multiple times per day. Rails provides skeleton code frameworks so we don't have to re-invent the wheel every time we want to add something simple like a sign in form or a picture upload feature.
There are a few ways that Twitter makes money. We have licensing deals in place with Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft's Bing to give them access to the "firehose" - a stream of tweets so that they can more easily incorporate those tweets into their search results.
In Summer 2010, we launched our Promoted Tweets product. Promoted Tweets are a special kind of tweet which appear at the top of search results within Twitter.com, if a company has bid on that keyword. Unlike search results in search engines, Promoted Tweets are normal tweets from a business, so they are as interactive as any other tweet - you can @reply, favorite or retweet a Promoted Tweet.
At the same time, we launched Promoted Trends, where companies can place a trend (clearly marked Promoted) within Twitter's Trending Topics. These are especially effective for upcoming launches, like a movie or album release.
Lastly, we started a Twitter account called @earlybird where we partner with other companies to provide users with a special, short-term deal. For example, we partnered with Virgin America for a special day of fares on Virginamerica.com that were only accessible through the link in the @earlybird tweet.
What's next for Twitter?
We continue to focus on building a product that provides value for users.
We're building Twitter, Inc into a successful, revenue-generating company that attracts world-class talent with an inspiring culture and attitude towards doing business.