A few bits of information about social media and the ‘big game’ yesterday to smile through Monday…Twitter reported today that in the final (exciting) 3 minutes of Sunday night’s 2012 Super Bowl game, there were an astonishing 10,000 tweets per second! In those three minutes that’s number with a whole lot of zeros in it. For those of you that haven’t yet gotten the Twitter logic quite down, Twitter is a world-wide social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to post their latest updates in 140 characters or less (and can be posted through three methods: web, text message, or instant message). Think of text messages on global steroids. The little-birdie-told-me concept T’was founded in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams (they launched publicly in July 2006).
Now if you even think America is even near tops in this field, think again…Sina Weibo tech (China’s Twitter-alike) is reporting that on the start of the Chinese dragon new year, sina weibo got 32312 messages per second on January 23rd, 2012 which, in China is 7000 higher than twitter’s recent record on January 13, when the TV movie ‘Laupita: Castle in the sky’ aired in Japan and garnered 25,088 tweets-per-second’s worth of attention…It seems they were tweeting along to a pivotal line in a television broadcast of a 25 year old movie. Compare these stats to last August when Beyoncé unveiled her pregnant belly at the MTV VMAs that boasted 8,800 tweets per itty-bitty second; the US is well…tame in comparison!
The advertisers just couldn’t wait for the big day to ‘unveil’ their latest babies, a 30 second shot at making YouTube history a week earlier than the hyped up day…a 30 second commercial began at $3.5 million so according to Pamorama: “This has moved the next-day buzz and the discussion everyone usually has (which ads were great, which weren’t) to the weeks leading up to when the game is actually played.”
Talk about a buzz kill! I’m glad I held out. Since Sunday was my first look-see I figure that the dogs snapped up the attention-getting quotient by 2-1 (by my own completely unscientific personal count). The mangiest (and cutest) among them had the biggest doggie moment since the Golden Globes when Uggie, the Jack Russell terrier in “The Artist,” ‘upstaged’ his co-stars with puppy-like enthusiasm while they accepted their Globe for best comedy movie. 
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All these people have something to discuss and share with one another, right? So why do we educators still not believe this kind of sharing is applicable for educational matters as well as the doggone entertaining ones?
