Women's World Cup Final Breaks Tweeting Record

By Caroline Chen Mon., Jul. 18 2011 at 10:25 AM

Categories: Sports, Tech

The FIFA Women's World Cup soccer final yesterday had thousands of people on the edge of their bar stools as Japan tied the U.S. and went into a nerve-wracking penalty shootout, sending Twitter users on a rampage.

Twitter reported that the match set the record for tweets per second, surpassing even the death of Osama bin Laden.

As the game heated up yesterday, tweeters were tweaking out, posting 7,196 tweets per second (tps) at one point. The previous record of 6,939 tps was set four seconds after midnight in Japan on New Year's Day, suggesting that the Japanese are a particularly tweet-happy population.

To put this glorious moment into context, bin Laden's death only garnered 5,106 tps.

Twitter, which turned five years old this month, has grown at an rapid pace, with its users firing off as many as 200 million tweets per day. One year ago, the daily average was 50 million tweets.

Other interesting Twitter stats:

According to Twitter, it has 175 million users, but does not know how many are active. In comparison, Facebook now has 700 million monthly active users
It takes users one week to send one billion Tweets.

460,000 new accounts were activated daily in March 2011
While 87 percent of Americans recognize the name Twitter, only 7 percent of Americans have an account.
The top user on Twitter is Lady Gaga, with 11,708,076 followers. Next in line are Justin Bieber, Barack Obama, and Britney Spears. Our president is in good company.

Here at SF Weekly, we have 16,838 followers.