Defying predictions that the velocity of tweets would render Twitter useless either technically or practically during last night's election, the site didn't break and was actually a pretty great place to keep up on news. This tweet from Twitter's creative lead Dave Bowman pretty much sums up how things went last night.
RIP, Fail Whale.
— Doug Bowman (@stop) November 7, 2012
To put that in context, the site peaked at 327,452 tweets per minute, 8 times the average, according to the site. And, Barack Obama tweeted the most ever retweeted tweet of all time, with a photo of him and Michelle at 11:16 p.m., minutes after Ohio was called, giving him the re-election.
By the way, that photo with over 3 million likes, also got most ever liked photo on Facebook crown last night, too. During all of that tweeting and retweeting, not once did the site go down, something that has plagued it during previous high trafficked events. When Michael Jackson died, for example, the site slogged. It also broke down during the 2010 FIFA World Cup. On election night, however, it persevered, leading AllThingsD's Mike Isaac to call this a "watershed moment" for the service. "It was Twitter’s watershed moment, performing as it should during the most tweeted-about political moments in the service’s six-year history," he said.
Read more at The Atlantic Wire.
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