The First Online Social Media Snowball Fight?

Amid the Snowmageddon pandemonium of this weekend, and news of lost power, stalled public transportation, downed trees and Starbucks closings, something spectacular happened at the intersection of online social media and frozen precipitation. Upwards of 3,000 people organized and staged a massive snowball fight in Dupont Circle on Saturday using online social media as the sole organizing strategy. The brawl began as an event on Facebook, established the Thursday before the storm. Word of the event spread to Twitter, and for most of Friday night and Saturday, the website's new local trending topics feature showed that both "Dupont Circle Snowball Fight" and "#dupontcircle" were some of the most typed phrases by Twitter users for nearly 24 hours.

As far as I'm aware of, a flashmob snowball fight of this magnitude has never been organized using Facebook and Twitter before. The success of the event is a testament to the power of online social media to spread information, organize, and mobilize. Even if the event in discussion was not of a particularly noble cause, it's manifestation proved the power of Facebook, and especially Twitter, to motivate people at a grassroots level to act.

Here is a video of the snowball fight that shows the scope of the huge gathering (credit to YouTube user goodboydc).

STOP! The World is Coming to an End

Snowmageddon, snowpocalypse, or whatever you chose to twitter-hashtag this snowstorm is coming to an end. Snow has stopped falling and now it is time for D.C. snow removal teams to take to the streets and begin a cleanup effort. If Mayor Fenty’s plan for the city to be open for Monday morning is going to come to fruition, then it is going to take more than his “750 employees working 12 hour shifts” to get it done; individuals, businesses, and even GW are going to have to remove snow from their property if the city is going to see anyting resembling regular business Monday, since by Saturday night, DC canceled Sunday's Circulator bus service and WMTA shut down everything except underground Metrorail service.

Watch a Washington Post Video of Mayor Adrian Fenty discussing snow removal:

Venturing outside Saturday afternoon was not hard at all, there was not that much ice, and the sidewalks and roads were easy to walk on. For those choosing to drive, it might have been more difficult, not only were pedestrians choosing the road over the sidewalk, ostensibly for the more compacted snow and better walking conditions, but it took a big car to take on the snowpocalypse.

What would a snowstorm be unless people on the internet decided to overplay the intensity to which the people of D.C. overreacted to the pending “snowstorm-of-doom.” On the internet you could find sites like snowpocalypsedc.com and snowpocalypse.com which (hopefully) were mocking the intense overreaction of a the city to snow.

Never fear, during the storm, UPD could be seen patrolling the streets, keeping us safe.