Into The Unknown

The CNN/Facebook collaboration was a remarkable look into the way that people are moving from regular, directed TV to more 'raw' news consumption - and readily commenting as it happens.

The CNN.com Live with Facebook page, which is offering the Flash stream of CNN with a Facebook 'representative sample' of realtime status comments from other viewers, looked like this a little earlier after you loaded it:

However, a little earlier, the "Connect or Sign Up for Facebook to discuss this historic inauguration" text changed to this rather more amusing version:

... 'i love my little elf boy'? Sounds like someone's found a back door to Facebook's infrastructure ;) What worries me is whether this is a merely cosmetic hack or whether this also indicates that deeper, more important sections of Facebook's infrastructure are theoretically available to view by more unscrupulous individuals. Are my personal details still safe, having logged into Facebook via that (authentic) CNN page earlier? Is it as simple (but still worrying) as an admin's details been compromised?

People need to watch their Facebook accounts for the next few days, juuuust in case.

On a lighter note, this day was certainly one for record breaking - not only does the USA have its first African-American President, but Mashable reports the statistics announced by CNN earlier:

"The stats released, as of noon ET:

1. There were 200,000+ status
   updates through the Facebook integration on CNN.com
2. At that time, 3,000 people commented on the Facebook CNN feed per minute
3. Obama’s Facebook Fan Page has more than 4 million fans and in
   excess of 500,000 wall posts

As of 11.45am, CNN:

• had served 13.9 million live video streams globally since 6am
• had broken its all time total daily streaming record (from Election Day) of 5.3 million live streams

Impressive numbers indeed."

I'll say! And, in traditional British manner, our BBC live stream handily broke down just after Obama's inaugural address - and only began to work again (with a low-key announcement on the BBC News inauguration coverage page) at around quarter past six UK time. Never mind, Blitz Spirit and all that!