Twitter decided the time is right to finally release some storm stats, and they are predictably mammoth:
According to the company,
There have been well over 20 million Tweets sent about the storm between Saturday, October 27th and today (November 1). That’s probably a conservative estimate as we only tracked Tweets with the terms “sandy,” “hurricane,” “#sandy,” and “#hurricane.”
That is, as they say, a lot of zee tweets. It also makes sense that cell usage spiked:
The number of times users in NYC loaded their home timeline from a mobile device peaked around 9pm on Monday night (approximately same time as ConEd explosion and resulting power outage), more than doubling the number from the previous 2 days.
But if you want to know whether more people tweeted furiously at the same time about Sandy compared to, say, pregnant Beyoncé, you’ll have to keep wondering: “TPM [tweets per minute] isn’t a really useful metric,” explains Twitter’s Rachael Horwitz. “We use that for live, televised events for example.” But Rachael, did the storm beat Beyoncé?
