Curious as to how the social web was reacting to the engagement, we turned to social media measurement platform Trendrr, which has previously helped us gauge the web's reaction to events such as Christmas, Obama's inauguration, New York Fashion Week and, most recently, the rescue of the Chilean miners.
As someone who was personally mourning my destroyed chances, I was surprised to learn that reaction was mostly positive (43%) on Twitter; another 41% of Twitter users responded neutrally to the news; and just 16% of tweets about the engagement were negative. Around 32% of bloggers reacted positively, while most (63%) conveyed a neutral reaction.
Unsurprisingly, those who discussed the engagement tended to be female (61%) and live in the UK. Most of the buzz on Twitter was generated by users from London (greater London alone accounted for 10% of all tweets), followed by Manchester, Glasgow (Scotland), Cardiff (Wales) and New York City. In terms of regions, England produced 36% of engagement-related buzz on Twitter, followed by the U.S., Canada, Scotland, Australia, India, New Zealand and Ireland.
In a one-hour span in the middle of the day today, 45,000 new news stories were indexed through Google News containing "Prince William."
Tell us: How did you respond to the news of the couple's engagement?
