Last night the Swedish version of the Eurovision Song Contest 2011 was broadcasted live on TV. It was the first out of four saturdays when the Swedish people will pick a Swedish representative for the big European event in Düsseldorf in May.
The ESC is a huge event that has been going on for decades, and it’s become more and more popular the last ten years. And now with the effect of social media, the hype just seems to explode. For a couple of years, there’s been a growing community of Swedish Twitterers/Tweeps that you could call early adopters and especially interested in social media and communication. Last year the Swedish version of the ESC was followed by a lot of these people and an extensive conversation, small talk I would say, was taking part on Twitter.
This year the small talk within a fairly limited community has grown into something much larger. The hashtag #mel2011 even raised into the top trending list world wide for a couple of hours. A Twingly liveboard channel was set up to display the Twitter stats for the hashtag, and the tweets just kept coming faster and faster, it wasn’t even possible to follow the flow.
In the end, after about two hours or so, the spam tweets started to show up. This is the risk of all trending topics, as we experienced with the #askacurator initiative in September 2010. How this will effect the next competitions within #mel2011, we’ll find out in the next couple of weeks.
In any case, the nicely designed Twingly Liveboard gave interesting statistics, and the speed of the twitterfall was astonishing. This makes me wonder how many people are actually using Twitter in Sweden? And how will communication through social media, and services like Twitter, evolve in the next couple of years?
The best use of Twitter last night goes to (my own awards): @wikimediase who happily threw themselves into the Twitter conversation giving links and personalized comments to each of the competing artists. Well done!
Kajsa Hartig 
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