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"Twitter has revealed that the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympic Games generated more than 9.66 million tweets, as the first day of the event went on to rack up more tweets than the entire 2008 Olympics in Beijing.\r\n\r\nThe chances are that if you logged in to Twitter during the spectacular scenes (yes James Bond escorted the Queen) then your timeline will have been flooded/entirely dominated by tweets from the show. It certainly was for me, and now Twitter has given an indication of the scale of things.\r\n\r\nIt's no surprise that the microblogging site was at the forefront of the discussion, and the US company has grown massively since Beijing. Back then it was a growing startup (that wasn't yet blocked in China), but today Twitter sees\u00A0a colossal 340 million tweets each day, a significant ratio of which will be Olympic-related over the next month or so.\r\n\r\nClearly the comparison is not a fair one for comparing the popularity of the Beijing and London events, given the massive difference in Twitter's adoption rates in 2008 and 2012, but it does clearly show the strides that the service has taken in the intervening period.\r\n\r\nTwitter didn't reveal the size of the highest spike of tweets on Friday, but a tweet\u00A0sent by\u00A0Tim Berners-Lee while he was on stage received more than 10,000 retweets alone - giving some indication of the buzz.\r\nThis is for everyone #london2012 #oneweb #openingceremony @webfoundation @w3c\r\n\r\n\u2014 Tim Berners-Lee (@timberners_lee) July 27, 2012\r\nAs well as providing a place for discussion and behind the scenes pics, Twitter has been the source of some early Olympic controversy.\r\n\r\nBritish politician Aidan Burley singled-handedly wrote headlines when he criticised the opening ceremony for being &amp;quot;leftie multi-cultural crap&amp;quot;.\r\nThank God the athletes have arrived! Now we can move on from leftie multi-cultural crap. Bring back red arrows, Shakespeare and the Stones!\r\n\r\n\u2014 Aidan Burley MP (@AidanBurleyMP) July 27, 2012\r\nBurley later claimed\u00A0that\u00A0he had been misunderstood, and was referring to the organisation rather than show itself, but, nonetheless, the contents of his two tweets were\u00A0widely reported\u00A0by the media.\r\n\r\nThe MP isn't the first prominent figure to find themself in hot water for a 140 character message. Days before the opening ceremony, Greek athlete Voula Papachristou\u00A0was removed from her country's London-bound team after a joke she tweeted drew criticism for being racist.\r\n\r\nHave you seen?\u00A025+ ways to watch and keep track of the London Olympics like a digital champion\u00A0\r\n\r\nImage via ABC News"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2012/07/28/london-olympics-opening-ceremony-sees-9-66m-tweets-beats-beijing-2008-total-in-just-24-hours/>