Twitter | Twitter On State Of The Union Night: America Groans

Twitter pushed out an infographic this morning on the tweet traffic surrounding last night's State Of The Union speech. It's studded with great little info-bits, but my favorite has to be this one: Of the 766,681 SOTU-related tweets posted between 9:05 and 10:40 pm, the highest volume came at 9:51 pm, just after the president's weak little joke about "spilled milk" (14,131 TPM, or Tweets Per Minute).

Of the many axioms about Twitter, the one I like best is "Facebook makes you hate people you know; Twitter makes you love people you've never met." Twitter on the night of a large-scale national event - debates, the State Of The Union, election night - is the Cheers bar most of us don't actually get to have in real life. It's a place (or, more accurately, a "place") where you can gather with like-minded strangers, sit back and kibitz. If the need to get in quick and keep it short leads to more snark and less value, well, that'd be true down at the pub too. Not that there isn't a quantity of useful, meaty commentary in those 140-character bursts; it all depends on who you follow. But if you buy the Cheers metaphor, there's something - well, cheering about the fact that the tweets flew hardest and fastest around the moment of Obama's little joke. It didn't exactly kill in the House chamber, and Obama is no Carson when it comes to salvaging the moment and turning it to his advantage. But in the electronic corner bar, those tweets flying thick and fast were the equivalent of a crowd of strangers issuing a collective good-natured groan, and being bonded just a little bit more tightly in the moments after.