Twitter and stagnation, tweeting from London on slow GDP numbers

Tweeting from the Financial District on announcement of UK GDP growth has slowed significantly.

Tweeting in a situation like this is very interesting. Certainly we saw the number rise significantly on our clime.me scale to 100. Right now we are very confident that people are tweeting more than normal in London City and near the government.

But the level is still nothing compared to the Oslo attack surge. Today in the City we saw a rise from 65 to 85, on the day of Oslo attacks we saw a rise from 10 to 85 nears the main hospital. People don't need to use twitter in a situation like this. No one has been so impacted by the UK bad economic news that their families will need to hear from them. Nor is there anything very interesting to photograph.

Journalists are probably chatting on the story and traders and government people may be using Twitter to gather information and sample sentiment. But anyone can get the entire story by turning on their TV.




What is interesting is how the rise in the City has translated to a much larger longer rise near the offices of government. This might indicate that twitter is used more in political and government related areas than trading. Bankers and traders will quickly go to their existing systems to deal with the impact of this bad news, but the government is in the business of public spin, and with the UK government facing serious questions of their relationship with News of the World executives bad economic news will be more blood for Britain's aggressive press.