The 2012 U.S. Presidential Election was always going to be a huge deal for Twitter, both in how (as a technical entity) the bird coped with the massive influx of tweets, links and media, but also in how Twitter, the brand, will likely springboard from November 6 into an exponentially bigger and more vital organisation and platform that will now see rapid adoption and growth around the world.
All-told, Twitter coped pretty well. I did notice some API errors around midnight but they were fleeting, and it’s impressive that it all held up as robustly as it did: some 31 million tweets about the election were sent yesterday, with the conversation peaking at a heady 327,452 tweets per minute (TPM).
As I revealed this morning, President Obama’s “Four more years” victory message has now become the most retweeted tweet in history, and a few of his other celebratory tweets are doing rather nicely, too.
Over on the official blog, Twitter takes a closer look at some of the other major events of last night.
And then there’s Donald Trump.
Trump, of course, has been very vocal in his criticism of Obama, both before and during the election campaign, making no secret of his support for Romney, nor his, how shall we put this, general (and fast-rising) level of insanity. And, once Obama’s re-election victory was secured, Trump’s response on Twitter went from the sublime to the ridiculous at a crazy, crazy pace.