Watching Obama - with the peanut gallery

With Facebook and Twitter, you'll never be alone watching the Presidential State of the Nation

I've watched many Presidential State of the Nation addresses. But never have I watched one with so much interactivity and voices from the peanut gallery (or as Twitter founder Jack Dorsey would refer to it - the many voices that make up the ambient noise).

Tonight, I'm watching the speech at my desk on my computer on CNN.com LIVE & Facebook' - with streams of updates from Facebook and Twitter. In fact, within about 10 minutes, there's been 91 updates under "President's" on Twitter. As I said in a previous post, this is a historic time in many ways. Not because of who's giving the speech, but who's watching and interacting.

I feel I'm in a global living room watching this event. 

As I said in a previous post about the coverage of the inauguration, "the coverage is leaps and bounds far more ubiquitous and dynamic than in past years. As recent as the last U.S. presidential election when President Bush was inaugurated in 2005, Facebook was barely a year old, and still confined to Harvard students. YouTube was not even founded, until February 2005. Twitter was barely a side project until a year later. For all we knew back in 2005, to Twitter meant to utter successive chirping sounds, Hulu meant a Chinese word for calabash and joost meant intoxicated." 

Today, these sites are allowing us to have shared experiences. And, of course these sites have given politicians another tool to conduct market research polls to find out what the "people" are saying. 

Someone on Facebook loves the idea that small businesses will be getting some aid. 

And, on Twitter, it looks like some are logging off to watch the speech. Hmm. Sounds good to me.