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Give a course, gain free consulting.

Last Friday was my last day at the White House. As I begin my fellowship at Harvard University, I'd like to share my reflections on public service.  "On a bright February day, the previous morning's dusting of snow melting on the ground, I arrived at a White House that was, as the Washington Post put it, "stuck" in the "Dark Ages of technology." In their words, "If the Obama campaign represented a sleek, new iPhone kind of future, the first day of the Obama administration looked more like the rotary-dial past." As my team congratulated me on the new job, they handed me a stack of documents with $27 billion worth of technology projects that were years behind schedule and millions of dollars over budget. At the time, those documents were what passed for real-time updates on the performance of IT projects. My neighbor's ten year old could look up the latest stats of his favorite baseball player on his phone on the school bus, but I couldn't get an update on how we were spending billions of taxpayer dollars while at my desk in the White House. And at the same time, the President of the United States had to fight tooth and nail to simply get a blackberry.  These were symptoms of a much larger problem.

Update: @TwitterGlobalPR has tweeted some factoids this afternoon. Twitter saw its highest rate of tweets per second last night with the peak coming with 5,106 at 11:00 p.m. EST. Between 10:45 p.m. and 12:30 a.m. EST Twitter average 3440 tweets per second. It is notable that Twitter did not crash under the load. A year ago at this time Twitter was having problems surrounding people tweeting about the soccer World Cup. This year the most notorious man in the world is killed and the company can handle it fine.