I'm impressed.
Streaming video is nothing new, neither is social networking, text chat, or anything along those lines. What is new, however, is the critical mass that online media has reached in society. Like many others, I watched the US Presidential Inauguration via a live internet video stream. I tried several, but settled on the stream from CNN (http://cnn.com/live) because it featured a Facebook integration, and seemed to hold up a bit better for me than some of the others (hulu.com, for one, was really bad when I tried it).
The CNN/Facebook integration was great - it tied together CNN's video stream (well, for a lot of the time, it was a good audio stream, punctuated by random still photos and spurts of video) with some of their news text, and most importantly, the ability to see (and comment on) what your friends are saying - as everyone is watching the same thing.
Via the Facebook integration's live updates, I was able to see the status (and comments) of friends who were watching the inauguration in person, from the mall in Washington, DC, on TV in their living rooms, or watching the same stream as I was from anywhere in the world. Facebook managed to bridge multiple media (including being live, in person, at the event via a mobile) and make the experience much richer than it ever could have been in the past - focusing on the people, and just assuming that everyone could see and hear pretty much the same thing.
Physically, I was alone in my office, but in reality I was able to experience a truly historic event together with my family and friends - transcending physical boundaries. I will be very interested to see information on how the campus network (and the intertubes in general) held up under the strain.
Update: "On Tuesday (presidential inauguration) there was a 62.5% increase on inbound traffic at UNL. The peak inbound rate was 1.3GB. Commercial Internet was running at full capacity from 8-5p.m while I2 with commodity peering was running at 440MB with 1GB available."
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