November 7, 2012
November 7, 2012
Whoops and cheers across President Barack Obama’s winning states after the Democrat’s win was announced Wednesday.
As soon as the results were announced, Obama posted on microblogging site Twitter: “This happened because of you. Thank you.”
President Barack Obama won re-election to a second term in the White House on Tuesday, television networks projected, beating Republican challenger Mitt Romney after a long and bitter campaign.
Obama defeated Romney in a series of key swing states despite a weak economic recovery and persistent high unemployment as U.S. voters decided between two starkly different visions for the country.
Obama enters his second four-year term faced with a difficult task of tackling $1 trillion annual deficits, reducing a $16 trillion national debt, overhauling expensive social programs and dealing with a gridlocked U.S. Congress that looked likely to maintain the same partisan makeup.
Social media response
Election Day in the United States became the most tweeted about event in U.S. political history Tuesday with enthusiastic firing off 20 million poll-related tweets, the social network said.
Americans flocked to Twitter and other platforms all day in a massive social media burst, posting photographic proof they had cast their ballots, cheering their favorite candidates along and analyzing the latest polls.
“With 20 million tweets, Election Day just became the most tweeted about event in US political history,” Twitter announced on its official government and politics account @gov.
The number far surpassed the 10.3 million tweets sent during the first presidential debate last month — an event the popular social network had at the time billed a record in U.S. political history.
In an indication of the importance of social networks in the presidential race, both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney took to Twitter, Facebook and Reddit just hours ahead of polls closing to make last-ditch pushes for votes.
The campaigns have used social media extensively over the past few months to push people to vote and even try and beat the record 2008 turnout, when two-thirds of U.S. voters cast a ballot.
Brining search engines to the frontier of social network browsing, Google began Tuesday to reconstruct its layout in order make more room, by shifting the tools menu to the top of the screen.
“There’s a bit more breathing room, and more focus on the answers you’re looking for, whether from Web results or from a feature like the Knowledge Graph.” Google Search lead designer Jon Wiley said in a blog post.
Google began rolling out new search results pages in the United States and said it wanted to make them available to users in other regions “as soon as we can.”
“You’ll notice a new simpler, cleaner design on the search results page.”
The California-based Internet titan said the change was intended to streamline search pages and make the layout on desktop computers consistent with those on smartphones and tablets.
Google also said that as part of its effort to streamline the service, it will stop letting people use background images to customize search homepages effective November 16.
Source: Al Arabiya
