It was just another Sunday night, checking my personal social networks before heading to bed. Then a tweet came up in my stream about Bin Laden. Then a few more. Switched over to Facebook and saw it in my newsfeed, too. Then saw a tweet “Turn on the TV” — so I did, and immediately a breaking news segment interrupted regular programming. Somewhere in there I also tweeted: “who else found out about Bin Laden on social networks first? me. #breaking“.
At 10:46 – Time to turn to Google during this lightbulb! moment – I should screenshot this. My first Google search displayed a number one result indexed from 3 days ago from Huffington Post, but just below that, realtime results started appearing. Also at this time, @replies and re-tweets in response to my tweet were flooding in. Many others saw this new break first on Twitter, too.
Google Search Results Adapting
At around 10:49 – on the first page of results an unconfirmed news story listing appeared referring to his death.
By 10:55 the engines had adapted ranking a TMZ article first (reminiscent of Michael Jackson death results). Another classic shoutout from Google to blogs.
In case you’re interested, I got my Washington Post breaking news email at 11:03 ET.
At 11:23, ABC News began reading tweets and reactions on air. Paraphrased: Social networks are giving people a voice and a platform to instantly discuss important, breaking issues. My sidenote: these social networks are not just for tweeting about our meal choices or our morning coffee. This is how we learn about HUGE, history-book-quality events.
Writing this and learning about his death is one of those snapshot moments of my life I’ll never forget. As a social media gal, I’ll also never forget how I found out, either. Pause to think about how you found out about 9/11. I’m betting it was by phone or TV.
One nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. 5.1.11. _____________ Complete Mashable’s poll “How did you hear about Osama Bin Laden’s Death” and let’s see what the results look like.
It was interesting last night to see SM way out-pacing the major new sites. CNN, MSNBC, and Fox all had their honk-bags in front of the cameras pontificating quickly enough, but when you went to their websites – they still had birther and tornado articles on the front page.
I think Huff Po beat them all with a splash shot of Bin-Laden, and 72 point text reading “DEAD” – which linked to a 404 error page (heh). Still the SM updates were sooo much better and faster!
Nice write up Renee!
I have been watching the news since 4am from the UEL Library to the Washington Post to all the way home!