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Texting, 1-2-3: Online Abuzz With Election Numbers

Tribune photo by ROBERT BURKE

Verizon Wireless saw text-message traffic in the Tampa Bay area jump 22.5 percent.

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By RICHARD MULLINS rmullins@tampatrib.com

The Tampa Tribune

Published: November 6, 2008

For Gail Sideman, sitting back and watching the election on TV just wasn't enough.

She watched TV, plus fired off text messages through Twitter.com, flipped from call to call on her cell phone and typed madly on her notebook computer, feeding news updates and blurbs to friends through her Facebook account.

She bounced from one gadget to the other as out-of-town friends sent her text messages about how each state voted. "I've never seen anything like it," she said. "It was cool to share thoughts from people throughout the country."

This is how a growing slice of America is coming to experience big news events: Interactively, creatively, on every gadget imaginable - and all at once.

Among all the changes surrounding the presidential election of 2008, more Americans than ever are using methods to communicate that barely existed in 2004. Tuesday night, Facebook, Twitter, Verizon Wireless and many more communications companies saw record usage as millions of Americans would receive news, then cascade it back out to growing network of friends and family.

During Tuesday, CNN broke most of its Internet records, with 5.3 million live video streams and 6.8 million on-demand streams.

Facebook.com saw traffic jump 20 percent, and 4.9 million people changed their personal Facebook status to "voted" during Nov. 4, triggering updates to their friends. (Two million sent each other election-related virtual gifts.)

Verizon Wireless alone saw text message traffic jump 22.5 percent in the Tampa Bay area. Data connections, such as sending photos via phone, jumped 9 percent.

As for moods in those messages, the University of Amsterdam tracked a nearly 300 percent increase Tuesday in use of the word "hopeful" within more than 1,500 personal blogs worldwide.

"The whole context of communications has changed between 2004 and 2008," said John Horrigan, a researcher with the Pew Internet Project. Since the last U.S. presidential election, home broadband Internet access has nearly doubled to almost 60 percent. Smart phones were almost unheard of in 2004, and richly interactive Web sites like Facebook or MySpace were just barely getting going. "Now those sites let people share so many different experiences."

Case in point: Susan Hagen, a publicist with the University of Rochester, held an election party at home and connected a PC to a projector to follow election results on TV networks while watching on-demand skits from Saturday Night Live and Comedy Central during commercial breaks.

"We could create our own political variety show, part comedy, part competition, part inspiration - something a single network would never have been able to do," she said, "and something that would have been impossible during the last election."

In another example, Jennifer Kushell was flying from Los Angeles to Arkansas, and out of touch with the news broadcasts Tuesday. However, she could check her friends' text messages on Twitter through her BlackBerry. Without it, "I would have felt very disconnected," she said. "Instead I was getting up-to-the-minute updates, feelings, emotions from my friends around the country."

Reporter Richard Mullins can be reached at (813) 259-7919.

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