Oprah announces retirement in 2011

It's into pop culture -- Oprah will retire in September of 2011. And that is breaking news.

News Alert
06:37 PM EST Thursday, November 19, 2009

Oprah to end her television talk show

After more than two decades on the airwaves, the trendsetting TV talk show host is stepping down.

For more information, visit washingtonpost.com - http://link.email.washingtonpost.com/r/O914NF/BCXS7/TLYM4O/GRXZFY/ISKC9/FW/t

The up to date story from The Post.

I decided nothing was required other than "Oprah." That should do it.

The announcement was 5:42 p.m. Eastern. I did not get it until 8:15 p.m. Central. The first search netted 1500 messages beginning at 7:55. At 8:30 they are coming at a rate of 200 to 300 per 5 minutes.

Mashable got Trendrr to do the entire screen. The Mashable page reports that there were 8,000 tweets the first hour. The figure as of the end of November 21 is.

I am not sure what it means that they have tweets for November 22 since it is now November 21. Perhaps it is November 22 somewhere.

Obviously I missed quite a few messages by missing the first 2+ hours.

November 25, 2009 at 1:30 a.m. it is time to call a halt. Almost all of the messages are about the show and not about closing the show. There is still a bit of a mix, but it looks like the 'breaking news' is over. The final count was 73,551.

The final time line was

And the .txt file that can be read by excel is oprah.txt

I wanted to do a long term comparison of Obama's Nobel Peace Prize award and Oprah's announcement of closing her show. So here are two Trendistic figures with 180 days for each.

Oprah

Obama

They are two really big spikes. Her's is not as big as his -- roughly 1.2% to 4%. Second, her spike is generally higher relative to everyday twittering than is his. Well, if you are president there should be more twitter messages, and if it is the Nobel Peace Prize it should be a really big spike.

The .txt file that can be read by Excel to acquire the data is: oprah.txt Notice that this file has more than the 65,000+ row limit of Excel 2003, but Excel 2007 does not have that limit.