TORONTO – The Internet has welcomed the new leader of the Roman Catholic Church with open arms.
The election of Pope Francis drew over seven million tweets, pouring in at a rate of more than 130,000 tweets per minute as the public reacted to the new Pope’s identity.
The Pope’s official Twitter account was also resurrected, after sitting idle since former Pope Benedict’s resignation, tweeting “HABEMUS PAPAM FRANCISCUM,” roughly translating to, “We have Pope Francis.”
The Tweet garnered over 25,000 re-tweets and over 5000 favourites in the first ten minutes.
But aside from the official Pope’s account, a quick search on Twitter for “Pope Francis” reveals over 40 results of parody and unofficial Twitter handles. A second search for Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Pope Francis’ real name, reveals another ten accounts.
Hundreds of people also took to the web to register domain names with the Pope’s name.
According to a spokesperson from domain name provider GoDaddy.com, over 100 domain names were registered within the first ten minutes of the announcement and 479 domains were registered with Go Daddy in the first hour.
“Keywords such as Pope, Francis, Bergoglio and Habemus Papam were used in identifying the new domain names registered with Go Daddy,” the Go Daddy spokesperson told Global News.
But one customer beat everyone to the chase – according to Go Daddy, the domain name PopeFrancis.com was registered by a Go Daddy customer in April, 2010.
Some web users are known to purchase domain names that will likely be linked to businesses, organizations or individuals in order to demand high prices for the domain when that individual or business wants to buy the name back.
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