Michael Jackson Funeral: 500,000+ Facebook Updates Posted

According to Mashable,

Facebook just sent us the staggering stats coming out of their live Michael Jackson memorial stream, created in partnership with CNN. The numbers far exceed those from Obama’s inauguration, making this the biggest live Facebook event in history.

The stats at 10.30am (30 minutes into the memorial itself, although the stream began earlier):

– 500,000 status updates posted
– 300,000 users logged in using FB Connect and CNN
– Approx 6,000 status updates per minute (double the average during Obama’s inauguration)

Facebook also adds that FB Connect support is present on Michael Jackson streams from E! Online, MTV and ABC News today. Michael is also far more popular on Facebook than Obama: as we reported yesterday, the Michael Jackson Facebook fan page is the most popular by far.

Some other interesting stats: over 800,000 people have given the free Michael Jackson glove virtual gift on Facebook, making it the most popular gift ever.

So while these are just preliminary numbers, it’s safe to say that Michael Jackson’s funeral is Facebook (Facebook)’s largest interactive event to date. When all is done, the total number of updates will likely exceed 1 million.

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Skittles.com – Chat the rainbow, this IS social collaboration

Folks, if you haven’t checked out Skittles’ new Web 2.0 campaign. Check it out now!

Mashable calls it out,

Many companies are starting to realize that whatever content they offer online still can’t match the various social media offerings out there, where the community contributes to the whole.

Few, however, have taken it so far as candy maker Skittles, which replaced its entire homepage with its Twitter stream. The only thing that’s left is a widget-like navigation console in the upper left part of the screen, but lo and behold: instead of pointing you to some company PR nonsense, it sends you to the Skittles entry on other popular social destinations: Wikipedia, YouTube, Flickr.
Skittles is basically saying: “We get it. Whatever we can do cannot be as awesome as what you guys and girls can do, so we’ll just link to it and let you do your thing.”

Future of advertising, social media style.