If you’re either American or Canadian (or just a hockey lover), chances are you were watching the gold medal hockey game yesterday. And with over 400 million users, there’s also a good chance you have a Facebook account. So what does it look like when those two worlds collide? Like the picture above.
As you can see, Facebook status updates per minute exploded at two times yesterday. The first peak, at 2:29 PM PST, is when Zack Parise of the U.S. tied the game with a goal in the third period. The second, much larger peak took place at 2:54 PM PST, when Sidney Crosby scored the game-winning goal for Canada in sudden-death overtime. All told, more than 3.5 million status updates were sent during those two times, according to Facebook. Perhaps even more remarkably, that was twice the pace of updates for the rest of the day.
While Twitter has yet to release similar stats, the service also undoubtedly saw an explosion of tweets during those two times. At one point after the U.S. scored, my entire tweet stream except for two tweets was some variation of “USA USA,” “OMFG!! USA,” “GOAL HOLY JESUS USA !!!1!!!,” or the like.
Data released a week or so ago had Twitter seeing 50 million tweets per day now. Meanwhile, recent Facebook data says that the networks sees over 60 million status updates posted each day (from 35 million active status updaters).
Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 1 billion monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original...
Created in 2006, Twitter is a global real-time communications platform with 400 million monthly visitors to twitter.com, more than 200 million monthly active users around the world. We see a billion tweets every 2.5 days on every conceivable topic. World leaders, major athletes, star performers, news organizations and entertainment outlets are among the millions of active Twitter accounts through which users can truly get the pulse of the planet.
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