life under electronic conditions

It is no big surprise that Obama’s inauguration generated a lot of buzz on Twitter. The hashtag #inaug09 quickly became one of the most frequently typed Twitter tag. But exactly how often did people tweet about Obama’s inauguration? We have quite detailed data about this day on Facebook:

Since this morning more than 1.5 million status updates have been posted through the feed (there were 200,000 b 8:30 am PST). During the broadcast an average of 4,000 status updates were written every minute, and 8,500 were written every minute during Obama’s speech.

Twitter only published a chart on the corporate blog - a chart without numbers:

They wrote:

We saw 5x normal tweets-per-second and about 4x tweets-per-minute as this chart illustrates.

But how much is 5x normal or 4x normal? Mashable wrote: “Tweets containing “Obama” hit 35,000 per hour during his speech.” This would be 583 Obama tweets per minute. Not too much.

My method: Fortunately every tweet has its own id which is simply increased by 1 with every new tweet. So to calculate the average Twitter speed during Obama’s inauguration, I looked for the first Obama tweet that had been posted at 12:00 and the first tweet at 1:00. The difference between those two is the number of tweets published during this hour.

The result: During 12pm and 1am, there had been 4746 tweets per minute (TPM).