Why did CNN’s web site dominate inauguration coverage? Facebook Connect?
CNN’s web site had the attention of more than four percent of U.S. web users when it streamed President Barack Obama’s inauguration live on Tuesday, according to a Compete traffic report today - much higher than rival Fox, CBS and MSNBC’s traffic combined. Why?
Maybe it was because CNN’s site was already much more popular, as you can see from the Compete traffic graph. Since most people already visited CNN’s web site for online news, its where they told their friends to go.
However, many of us were impressed by CNN’s integration of Facebook Connect (even though the video wasn’t perfect). Maybe that service’s success had something to do with the traffic increase? It basically lets you chat with your friends on Facebook while watching the inauguration on CNN, repurposing Facebook status updates feature into a real-time threaded chat service. Facebook said that more than 1.5 million status messages were generated on the CNN site that day. See screenshot below.
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