Obama Declares Election Victory Via Email And Tweet Before Speech. This is tomorrow’s democracy.
Barack Obama has just announced his win in the presidential election by sending a tweet and an email to supporters before going on stage in person to deliver his acceptance speech. With the subject line “How This Happened,” Obama’s email noted “I want you to know that this wasn’t fate, and it wasn’t an accident. You made this happen.” Shortly before sending the email Obama tweeted a photo of him and his wife hugging with the description “Four more years.” It’s since become the most retweeted tweet of all time. Obama's Google+ Hangout Didn't Change the Game, It Just Changed the Channel. The President of the United States held a Google+ Hangout today.
He fielded questions selected from over 130,000 submissions as well as from five lucky Americans selected to hang out with him live. For the rest of us, it was a streaming video experience. It began with a swooping, dramatic intro, and then Google MC Steve Grove took control of the proceedings. This is the most user-friendly White House in history. It was a nice experiment in Web-enabled democracy.
The Tweet That Killed A Presidential Campaign. Last week the people of Ireland went to the polls and elected Michael D Higgins, a 70 year old former Minister for the Arts and poet, as their ninth president.
Just a week earlier Higgins had been trailing by 15 percentage points in the polls to the frontrunner Seán Gallagher, an entrepreneur and star of Irish reality TV show Dragon’s Den. Gallagher’s 40 per cent support in the polls had imploded in the dying days of the campaign, largely as a result of his performance during the final televised debate.