You got to hand it to @AnnDRomney — she played Hilary Rosen masterfully with her use of social media.  At 10:17 pm EDT, she had not made a single tweet.  Then at 10:18, she wrote:

And then all heck broke loose.  Here’s a chart of the number of tweets that talked about Ann over the next 24 hours:

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A huge spike over 3000 tweets per hour during the 11pm (EDT) hour of the day, only settling down around 2am before staring to climb back up again around 8am, making it back to over 2500 TPH by mid morning.

And what was everyone talking about? Here’s a list of the most frequently appearing words in those tweets:

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You wouldn’t have to guess too hard what the topic was.  Of course, almost 10% of the tweets were a re-tweet of Ann’s first message.  Talk about Klout!

There weren’t any distinctive pattern of hash tags, and the people most mentioned in the tweets are the obvious ones — Hilary Rosen was mentioned in over 20% of the Tweets.

Of course Hilary got an amazing boost of popularity/notoriety as well:

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Interestingly, there were just about as many tweets mentioning @hilaryr as @anndromney, even though each only appeared in about 20% of the tweets mentioning the other.

I don’t want to weigh in on the controversy, but I will say this.  From never having tweeted before, Ann Romney has done incredibly well to shape and define the debate using Twitter.  I saw both of them on TV yesterday, and Ann looked poised and in control while Hilary looked like the kid who was being dragged to the neighbor’s house to apologize for TPing the yard. My advice to Hilary: It’s good you said you’re sorry but stop trying to rephrase what you said in a way that you think will pass muster.  It just looks like you’re only sorry you got caught.

Personal bias disclaimer: I thought Hilary was trying to destroy the internet in the 90s by leading the RIAA in attacking everything that might pose a risk to the music industry. Schadenfreude ist die schönste Freude.