Facebook And CNN Connect To Deliver Truly Social News

22nd January 2009

Even as people turned out in millions, braving the weather in Washington, to hear the inaugural speech ofÂ President Barack Obama in person, Facebook and CNN came together to allow users all over the world to witness the event live online.

While CNN.com relayed the event live through its video player, status updates from Facebook users watching the video were streamed in the sidebar.

The integration between the broadcast on CNN.com and the status updates from Facebook was enabled through Facebook Connect, their equivalent of OpenSocial that was launched last month. Facebook Connect allows users to port their online identity across third-party websites that use the platform.
The relay of President Obamaâ€™s inaugural speech by CNN.com along with status updates by Facebook users is a great success for Facebook Connect, which has raced ahead of its rival Google Friend Connect, with this achievement.

According to reports, over 18.8 million individuals viewed the speech and recorded 1.3 million status updates during the speech. Obamaâ€™s Facebook fan page now has over 4 million fans and over 5,00,000 wall posts.

CNN broke its previous record of election day coverage, when they had 5.3 million streams. They relayed over 8 million live streams this time. In fact, some users on CNN.com actually had to wait for others to sign out before they could access the site.

Tags: cnn, facebook, facebook-connect, social media

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