#OnlyOnTwitter: Announcements and surprises

We have a couple of moments to share with you this week of things that happened #OnlyOnTwitter. Two of our stories this week are about announcements. In one, Twitter was the platform of choice for hundreds of thousands of people to express their views on President Obama’s decision to support gay marriage. In another, Twitter was the creative canvas upon which The Atlantic drew a graphic. And then, just for fun, did you know that Salman Rushdie follows Molly Ringwald? He does.

On Wednesday, President Obama expressed his support for gay marriage during a taped television interview. He quickly shared the news on Twitter, driving the conversation to its highest levels:

Elected officials from both sides of the aisle also turned to Twitter to voice their opinions about Obama’s announcement:

While our @gov team tweeted their data about the gay marriage conversation via an embedded image, The Atlantic’s new business site “Quartz” turned their Tweets into infographics about cellphone usage:

Finally, it’s always fascinating to see how Twitter can bring people together. This week, a writer in New York casually noted that author @SalmanRushdie is following actress @MollyRingwald — and was in for a bit of a surprise when they both responded:

Posted by Andrew Fitzgerald, Manager, Editorial Programming (@magicandrew)