Monday, September 8, 2008

The Week in Review

The big stories on Twitter from last week:

Hurricane Gustav- Luckily the storm did not have the impact that we all feared. However, Twitter showed its value as a community and tool for fast distribution of news.  Andy Carvin put together the Hurricane Information Center, a social network devoted to the storm.But most of the communication was via Twitter. CNN's Rick Sanchez put Twitter on the network as they responded to the Twitterverse's questions, news and comments prior, during and after the storm on air. And New Orleans' own Mark Mayhew posted tweets and photos throughout the drama.

RNC08- The Republican National Convention was popular on Twitter all week, even spawning a "brandjacked" character, NotSarahPalin, with a somewhat humorous or painful perspective depending on your true color. There were also some pretty cool tools developed to report on the Twitter activities like one from CSPAN, Govtweets,  and Politweets.

Bye bye Fail Whale - As reported by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, the necessary back end repairs to Twitter have been made and they are proud about their reliability improvements. In fact, Twitter had record uptime in August of 99.88%, down for less than an hour compared to May's 21.