On Monday Steph got whacked in the wrist with a soccer ball in gym class and was really complaining about the pain. By Tuesday it was still swollen and painful, so after school I took her to the ER for an x-ray. In my gut, I felt pretty certain it wasn't broken, but of course I couldn't be sure. So we went and we waited. And we waited. And we waited some more. I was tweeting and web-surfing frantically from my iPhone, terrified I'd miss the early election returns coming in—or, at the very least, lots of clever repartee. I was imagining myself as Sally, squandering her big night in the Pumpkin Patch with Linus. Finally, after 4 hours, we were sent home with a wrist splint and an excuse note for gym class.
I immediately ran to my MacBook to followed the returns. I was clicking around among various websites—all the usual suspects, from CNN to 538 and everything in between—trying to find my groove. (You know how I feel about TV, so I didn't bother turning it on until the end, to watch the speeches.) But I quickly discovered that the place to be was Twitter. The news coming down my Twitter pipeline was more timely and accurate and link-filled than anything I could find on any one site. There was witty banter, sharp insights, incisive observations, and a whole lot of drinking going on in the Twitterverse last night.
I wish I had kept track of the best tweets that flew by last night, but I was too caught up in the moment. I did tweet Obama as soon as he won! (I had tweeted him on Monday to offer condolences on his grandmother's death, too.) Today I got this tweet from him—me and his other 118,377 Twitter followers, that is! Someone remarked that it will be interesting to get tweets from the White House next year.
Oh spit, now I'm going to have to join Twitter. Thanks a lot, buster.
Posted by: Naomi | November 05, 2008 at 07:42 PM
Naomi- you should check out Tropicana's election twitter app:
http://anorangeamerica.com/
The "freshly squeezed election tweets" takes tweets and creates a "bubble" proportional to each term's volume (like a word cloud). It then draws connections between terms mentioned together. It's a fun thing to play around with to see what people are twittering about. I've been working on the site with Tropicana, and we just launched it yesterday morning.
Posted by: Mark | November 07, 2008 at 10:23 AM