The problem was that I only followed one person's Twitter feed -- Andy Carvin. I picked Andy because he practically invented the notion of reporting events via a live Twitter stream during the Arab Spring.
I said I found Andy's election coverage boring and often uninteresting to me, but I overlooked the fact that Twitter is social. I should have followed many feeds, not just Andy's. For example, if I had been following the candidate's feeds, I would have seen President Obama's victory tweet, the most re-tweeted post ever.
Twitter has published other statistics and memorable tweets. It turns out they hit a rate of 327,452 tweets per minute, and did not crash. (They were known for crashing under load in the past).

My name is Larry Press. I am an information systems professor and have been learning and teaching about information technology since the days of unit record equipment.