Apple's iPad Announcement Measured in Tweets

Now time for some MacRumors "iPad" stats from yesterday. That'll be more interesting!

Ah, yes. Don't underestimate the power of Twitter. Yesterday, for the first time ever, I signed up for mobile alerts, for the purpose of getting MacRumors iPad-related tweets pushed to my phone. Never thought I would see that day come.

Twitter is definitely an indicator but I want to know how many more people were on Facebook telling their close friends. I know I was. Didn't Tweet it once.

MacRumors said:

Apple's iPad Announcement Measured in Tweets

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*lol*

Some people have too much time.

SandboxGeneral said:

I find that viewing the MacRumors Forum Spy is akin to TV channel surfing.

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You have also too much time. ;-)

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9B176 Safari/7534.48.3)

The keynote audience suggested to me that 4GLTE got the loudest applause.

nicee.. social networking is crazyyy nowadays

Caliber26 said:

Ah, yes. Don't underestimate the power of Twitter. Yesterday, for the first time ever, I signed up for mobile alerts, for the purpose of getting MacRumors iPad-related tweets pushed to my phone. Never thought I would see that day come.

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I seldom use Twitter, but I totally did the same exact thing for the exact same reasons.

Pretty snazzy measurements to say the least.

No spike when Tim Cook said "and BOOM"... Disappointed.

Fascinating.............

BJB Productions said:

I seldom use Twitter, but I totally did the same exact thing for the exact same reasons.

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That's awesome. Glad to see I'm not alone in my obsession with Apple launches. I think I'll leave them on, actually.

This chart is fun to watch but don't read too much into it.

In terms of mathematics: It's a pretty example for the convolution of box filters (or dirac delta functions) with an exponential curve, plus an offset.

11k news tweets are not *that* much. It is just about 10 times more than the usual background noise. And after the event was closed, the curve very quickly becomes background noise again. The half-value period is about 20 Minutes meaning after two hours, more than 95% of the "hype" has already gone.

But as I said, it's fun to watch. Much more interesting than the event itself... Oh, I should not have said that

I think there were more tweets about Kony at that time.

Twitter! and Apps!

Caliber26 said:

Ah, yes. Don't underestimate the power of Twitter. Yesterday, for the first time ever, I signed up for mobile alerts, for the purpose of getting MacRumors iPad-related tweets pushed to my phone. Never thought I would see that day come.

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I agree the power of twitter is out of this world! If you ever need an app developing then feel free to check us out, we are web developers based in the UK, cheers.

Manderby said:

This chart is fun to watch but don't read too much into it.

In terms of mathematics: It's a pretty example for the convolution of box filters (or dirac delta functions) with an exponential curve, plus an offset.

11k news tweets are not *that* much. It is just about 10 times more than the usual background noise. And after the event was closed, the curve very quickly becomes background noise again. The half-value period is about 20 Minutes meaning after two hours, more than 95% of the "hype" has already gone.

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If you went from 6 feet tall to 60 feet tall, even for a brief period of time, it would be worth noting, and probably not only by you.

You do have a point about this being so-so relative to other "big" events, though. By comparison, I believe the peak tweets-per-minute when Whitney Houston's death was reported was something like 60k.

So twitter reads all my tweets whether i want it to or not and publishes metrics on them? Or are these just public tweets? Me thinks not.

Edit: Also note 10k is the max. Twitter is hyped to the max, If I said 10k views on youtube, you would yawn.

Funny that there's no spike for Apple TV announcement. That's the one that mattered more to me. Interesting that there aren't that many people out there who care about it.

tbob said:

Funny that there's no spike for Apple TV announcement.

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That's because they were looking at tweets with "iPad" in them.

SuperCachetes said:

If you went from 6 feet tall to 60 feet tall, even for a brief period of time, it would be worth noting, and probably not only by you.

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As long as we do not talk about inches ...

Mr. Retrofire said:

*lol*

Some people have too much time.

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They also happen to do this with other major events, since it's actually useful information for Twitter itself. In fact, one could argue that this is part of the core value proposition of Twitter -- the ability to judge interest and reaction in real-time.

It's not all that difficult to compile the data into an interesting chart; there are even websites that perform the task in real-time. I don't see how this qualifies as "having too much time."

dBeats said:

Also note 10k is the max. Twitter is hyped to the max, If I said 10k views on youtube, you would yawn.

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Uh... that's 10k per minute. I'm not a huge youtube statistician. But I would think that 10,000 views per minute, trailing off over an hour or so, would be remarkable. That's somewhere around a quarter million tweets over the course of the event.

~1M tweets on the iPad launch event

The graph suggests that the event is tweeted about 1M times in 6 hours. Not a bad marketing feat!

How many companies are able to achieve that for a product launch?

Note: the graph suggests ~1k tweets/min is steady state; not necessarily event related. A significant part may be new iPad activations tweeting they've got their new iPad!