While 1.8 million people attended Tuesday's Inauguration in person, the rest of us found ways to experience it online. Whether at work, home or on the road with our smartphones, major Web sites provided means, (although struggling to deliver a smooth experience), to get the U.S. and the rest of the world involved.
Nielsen Online just announced U.S. web traffic figures for Tuesday's Presidential Inauguration. Coming in at the No. 1 most visited site was CNN, with 11 million unique visitors for the event, followed by MSNBC at number two with 10 million, and Yahoo! News at number three with 9.1 million.
Below is a list of the top 10 sites ranked by unique audiences on Inauguration day according to Nielsen's report.
Watching footage on these sites was obviously the most popular way to experience the inauguration, but other companies were able to offer a more interactive experience.
Qik, an online live video streaming provider, set up an event page where users could stream live video from the Inauguration for people to view on Qik. The style of the videos being very much citizen journalism like. Out of the humble 35 who actually participated in Qik's page were famous names like Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore.
Twitter, a micro blogging site which allows you to post instant short blurbs about where you are or what your doing, reported 4 times the amount of tweet per minute on Inauguration day according to their blog.
Hulu, a popular television on the web site, also streamed the Inauguration live. They reported the event set a new record for Hulu in terms of live streams, beating out the presidential debates and the Palin/Joe Biden debate, which they also streamed. Unfortunately they would not share an exact numbers of visitors.
According to Akamai’s Net Usage index, web traffic for major sites covering and streaming the Obama Inauguration peaked out at 5,401,250 visitors per minute. This ranking in at number 5 in the index with number 1 being Nov. 4th, 2008, Election Day. See below:
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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.
