Getting Ready for Inauguration Day – on Facebook and Everywhere Else
by
on January 08, 2009,
It proves that Facebook is quickly becoming the place to turn to whenever you want to achieve something important and change the world to a certain extent. One of the interesting examples is about students from Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland using Facebook to find support for their important cause: making the Inaguration Day a school holiday.
The students decided that they lived too close to Washington not to go to the presidential inauguration and they also thought that Facebook was exactly the right place to find support to achieve their goal. So they created a Facebook group to gather support for their petition - and easily reached the goal. As a result, their parents are now encouraged by schools to take their children to inauguration to Washington - whatever their own political views are.
But this is only one example of how Facebook is used by one small group of people for preparation to the Inauguration Day - while there are numerous others and the activity around the Inauguration Day is everywhere on the social network. Of course there are multiple groups intended to help all the people planning to arrive to Washington for the Inauguration Day to feel comfortable and know where to go and what to do. The largest such group is Inauguration 2009 in DC - Where To Go, What To Do!!, it already has more than 22 thousand members who engage in numerous discussions around the event and are also offered various helpful links advising them on activities in the District Columbia for the January 20th.
But of course the most important thing for Facebook about inauguration is its partnership with CNN announced earlier today. As we should expect, CNN will be broadcasting Barack Obama’s inauguration live at CNN.com/live from as early as 8 a.m. EST on January 20 for everyone to be able to watch inauguration events online for free - no matter how far from the Capito Hill we are.
The CNN partnership with Facebook means close interconnection between watching the CNN inaugural content live and communicating with one’s friends on the social network. First of all, there is a special CNN inauguration event on Facebook where everyone can confirm attendance - no matter where we are. What’s interesting, it will even be possible to update one’s Facebook status right from the CNN Live website when watching the inauguration online - for all your friends to know you are there. And CNN Live website will also feature status updates from one’s friends on Facebook to make the interconnection complete. So for anyone not willing to deal with traffic in Washington or stuck in the office or located thousands of miles away from Washington like I am we can always RSVP for CNN event - and watch everything live anyway.
There are other pretty interesting things going on for the Inauguration Day on Facebook: for example, someone is trying to gather as many as one million volunteers by the Inauguration Day for real work that is supposed to begin in late January to make the famous change possible. Unfortunately for now this person does not seem to be very successful as the group only has 154 members as of writing this so chances are they won’t make it - unless of course everyone actually jumps to help them right now and begins inviting friends like crazy. And the funniest group I found on Facebook about inauguration is here and you should join it if you think that Dunkin’ Donuts and Krispy Kreme should make special Obama-colored donuts for the Inauguration Day.
Of course not everyone is so positive and there are also groups for people declaring their intentions to leave the US and move to various places like New Zealand and Iceland on the day of Barack Obama’s inauguration - but they don’t really seem to be very active so it looks like positive attitude prevails on Facebook and everywhere else as well.
There are tons of official information available everywhere - just do a quick search on Google - but if you want to stick to our beloved Twitter for the Inauguration Day talks and updates, use the hashtage #inaug09 to track everything that is said. Too bad people are already concerned about the potential Twitter downtimes but the multitude of places where we can get our fair share of live coverage - be it CNN or Twitter or maybe FriendFeed (with someone hopefully creating a real-time group for all the news there) - no matter where we live.
