The Huffington Post's Danny Shea writes about CNN's real-time Twitter analysis of Wednesday's State of the Union speech...

"We turned the corner tonight," Alex Wellen, CNN's Senior Executive Producer, Integrated Programming said in the control room shortly after King demonstrated the technology for the first time.

Wellen said that CNN had access to the entire "firehose" of Twitter data, as opposed to the limited amounts Twitter makes publicly available for search, and said that there were three elements that made the analysis successful: 1. massive amounts of data, 2. timing of that data, and 3. state-by-state geotagging of that data.

"All together, it gave us a 50,000 foot view of what the Twitter reaction was," he said.