Around the web

• Must-read: "Obama Wins: How Quants and Data Crunchers Made It Possible," by TIME's Michael Scherer, based on an embargoed Nov. 4 interview with senior staffers.

• Just a few minutes after the networks began projecting Obama's victory, the Obama campaign sent out an e-mail at 11:16 p.m. with the subject line: "How this happened."

• According to Facebook, the image posted by Obama on the site indicating his victory is the most liked Facebook photo of all time with over two million likes.

• The Obama campaign website showed the message: "Thank You This is Your Victory."

• CNN's Dana Bash noted on Twitter that the Romney website was streaming the Obama acceptance speech.

• @cosentino posted a picture on Twitter comparing Nate Silver's prediction and its close correlation with the actual result. At 12:15 a.m. Silver tweeted, "This is probably a good time to link to my book."

• CNN projected the electoral college results on the Empire State Building, which turned blue by the end of the night.

• German online news site Netzpolitik noted at 11:05 p.m. that Romney's online campaign seemed to have "gone home," with no updates on any online channels in the past five hours. Romney posted a Thank You message on Facebook and his website, but didn't post anything on Twitter.

• According to Twitter, with 20 million tweets, Election Day became the most tweeted about event in political history. President Obama's Twitter message after reelection is his most retweeted ever. Many foreign leaders, such as Britain's David Cameron, congratulated Obama on Twitter.

• False Twitter reports seemed to be at a minimum, with the exception of a report just before 10 p.m. claiming that NBC News had called the Massachusetts U.S. Senate race for Elizabeth Warren before it actually had. The tweet seemed to originate from the Center for American Progress. There was also a false viral news report that former President George W. Bush had wrongly voted for Obama.

• Chris Krewson, editor of HollywoodReporter.com, tweeted, "INBOX: MPAA Chief Chris Dodd - "President Obama has demonstrated a great understanding of the importance of intellectual property..." #SOPA"

• Several world leaders including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, New Zealand Prime Minister John Key, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg offered Obama their congratulations on Facebook, often posting photos of themselves with the president.

• According to a Pew study, 22 percent of registered voters let others know how they voted on a social networking site, 30 percent of registered voters for either candidate have been encouraged to vote for either candidate via social media posts, while 20 percent of registered voters encouraged others to vote on social media.

• Even though some people had trouble with Facebook's voter tool, Facebook tabulated that 9,682,443 identified themselves as voters. Voter indication seemed to peak after 2 p.m. ET. About twice as many females indicated themselves as voters than males, and 31 percent of voters were between 25 and 34, while 29 percent were between 18 and 24.

• From 11 p.m. to 12 a.m., the top rising Google searches nationwide were 1) Obama Wins 2) Did Obama Win 3) CA Propositions 4) Obama Twitter. In the half hour leading up to the projections, search interest for Obama went up 395 percent. Some top search terms associated with Obama during the day were Obamacare, 2012, 2016 and Michelle, top search terms associated with Romney were Ann, Will Win, Ryan and Bio.

• Earlier, Google posted its analysis of search interest for Obama and Romney in swing states leading up to Election Day.

• According to Facebook, among the top terms mentioned on Election Day were Obama, Vote/Voted, Romney and Election.

• Foursquare tabulated voter check-ins on a map.

• At 6:13 p.m., the Obama campaign tweeted a link to a video with Stephanie Cutter with the comment "Don't watch this video."

• Throughout the day, the Obama campaign continued to send out e-mails encouraging supporters to call on their friends in swing states to vote before the polls closed or to make calls or share messages of support for Obama with their friends. Obama also posted another brief message on Reddit encouraging users to vote and spread the message to their friends and family. One e-mail address received four voting encouragement e-mails from the Romney campaign and 11 e-mails from the Obama campaign.

• The New Republic reported that 20 percent of New York Times traffic on Nov. 5 was going to Nate Silver.

• Dispatch, a collaboration between Tumblr, the Columbia Journalism School's Tow Center and Stanford University to test a mobile application that provides secure, authenticated, anonymous instant publishing, posted impressions from voting in New York City.

• CNN noted that taking pictures of ballots was illegal in many states. In New York City, Gothamist reported via Syracuse.com that "Lawyers for the New York State Board of Elections made a decision today that it does not violate New York State laws to post photographs of ballots online. New York State law prohibits a voter from showing his ballot to others after it is filled out. But lawyers for the state Board of Elections determined today that a photo is different than an actual ballot, spokesman John Conklin said.'We did it, Internet! Instagram your little hearts out."

• Voters documented problems at the polls using sites like PollWatch USA, MyFairElection and havingtroublevoting.com.

• Even foreign news outlets, like a prominent German news broadcaster, noted that reports were coming in on sites like ourvotelive.

• New Jersey extended its deadline for e-mail and fax voting until Friday.

• McAfee VP & Chief Privacy Officer Michelle Dennedy spoke with Bloomberg News about why most people in the U.S. can't vote online.

• VoteForEddie.com got 8 percent of the vote in Florida's 25 Congressional District, which Republican candidate Mario Diaz-Balart won with 76 percent of the vote.

• The New York City Board of Elections blamed some of its problems on the fact that some voters were using the new machines, which were introduced two years ago, for the first time.

• A Quartz contributor argued that the U.S. and other countries should not try to make voting too high-tech.

• British web users have been searching Google for "electoral college."

• The Guardian recapped the election in graphic novel form.

• Google co-founder Sergey Brin suggested that the election winner should withdraw from their party and govern as independents.