Fueled by a long anticipated product launch, a name guessing game for the new product, and the always fun iPhone to Verizon hopes, the expectations for yesterday’s Apple unveiling were high and the interactions on Twitter certainly reflected that. According to Trendrr.com, there were 177,000 iPad tweets within the first hour alone following the announcement. That’s an average of 3,000 iPad tweets per minute and who knows how many more there would have been had the Bailey Gardiner team been in the office (yesterday was our agency retreat and, don’t worry, there are lots of photos and video to come).

Not only is the sheer volume of iPad tweets notable, but so is the sentiment. According to Mashable, Crimson Hexagon took the time to analyze the sentiment of more than half a million iPad tweets following  the announcement. While about 50 percent of the people had negative feedback and 50 percent had positive, 29 percent of those tweets showed intent to buy the product. That’s about 145,000 people at $500, for the least expensive version, creating at least $72,500,000 in sales if everyone who tweeted about buying the new product actually does go buy one. Personally, even though I’m a Mac lover, I fall within the 21 percent who thought it had a stupid name.

The high level of iPad tweets show that more and more people are turning to Twitter as a resource for breaking news and a venue to share their opinions. When I logged into Twitter this morning #ipad, iTablet, Apple iPad, #itampon, and MaxiPad (reinforcing the stupid name theory) are still trending in the U.S. on Twitter and probably will be for a while to come. I wonder what they will come up with next?