As best I can tell, the news broke on Twitter at about 11:07AM, when KXAN Austin News tweeted "UIL is postponing all competition until May 11 due to swine flu fears" to well over 4000 followers. From that message through 3pm, tweets about the announcement had about 430,000 followers:
# of followers of UIL Delay-related TweetsA majority of those were the 300,000 followers of @BreakingNews, who are spread all over the world. If I remove that one tweet ("Texas is postponing all high school athletic and academic competitions until May 11 because of swine flu outbreak." at 11:26 AM), there's pretty constant growth reaching over 125,000 followers by 3pm:
# of followers of UIL Delay-related Tweets, not including @BreakingNewsMostly this is just for fun, but it does lead to questions about timeliness and source of communications: How many affected parents heard about the delay from an unofficial source before any district employee contacted them? Is that a bad thing? (Please share your thoughts in the comments!)
More about the data: I used the Twitter API to search for UIL related tweets and download the results as XML files, then I recorded the number of followers each account had. I did my best to build an accurate picture, but the numbers can't possibly be perfect: Since these follower counts were gathered later, they are definitely higher than they were when each account made its UIL tweet. Not every follower of an account will have seen the UIL tweet. Although I gathered data on over 300 tweets, I certainly missed some.
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