I heard a new name today, Felix Baumgartner, while at work on a Sunday and took a short break to see what the world was doing at that exact moment. A name I’d never heard of was trending everywhere, so I went looking. A tweet from a friend, something like “someone tell me why everyone’s jumping,” pointed me toward a YouTube live link, where I half-expected some kind of alien-visitor moment. Instead: a man about to jump from 36 kilometers above the earth, followed live by millions across Twitter, YouTube and Facebook.
On YouTube, I caught the live stream with about 6,440,493 people already watching, a number that kept climbing as the jump got closer, fed by nonstop sharing across Twitter and Facebook and picked up by news agencies posting the live link themselves. By the time Baumgartner actually made the jump, roughly 8.1 million people were watching at once.
On Facebook, once he’d landed, his sponsor Red Bull posted a photo of him kneeling, apparently giving thanks. In under 40 minutes that photo had been shared more than 29,000 times, with around 216,000 likes and 10,000 comments. Red Bull immediately opened a Q&A, promising to answer fan questions during the press conference.
On Twitter, half the world seemed to be talking about it during the buildup and after landing, enough to briefly outpace tweets about Justin Bieber’s concert happening the same night. Actors, musicians, athletes, everyone with an audience weighed in. Baumgartner himself tweeted after landing. The questions I saw floating around were a good summary of the mood: was he going to die or become a hero, why was it taking so long, what was actually up there, would you have had the nerve to jump and who’s writing this guy’s tweets, because they’re sharper than they have any right to be.
Meanwhile in Kosovo: most people apparently just wanted to see Enver Sekiraqa react to it on RTK. That didn’t happen.
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