Some of you may remember last August when I blogged about Beyoncé’s pregnancy announcement setting records on Twitter for the most tweets per second on a given topic. But even with a whopping 8,868 tweets, the MTV VMAs announcement that she and Jay-Z were expecting a child is no longer the most tweeted about moment in the history of the micro-blogging network.
To be fair, this record was broken last year, but I’m not exactly clued up on Japanese anime movies so it’s no surprise that I didn’t notice that there were 25,088 tweets per second when Castle in the Sky was aired on December 9th 2011. However, yesterday a new record was set for sports, as the Twitter reaction to Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow’s 80-yard overtime touchdown pass on Sunday night reached 9,420 tweets per second. But it wasn’t just Twitter that was going haywire, with six Broncos-related topics trending on Google.
It’s crazy how an event or occurrence that can be over in a matter of seconds can have such long-lasting effects and continue to be the topic of discussion, long after the moment has passed. On Mashable there is a list of the top 15 highest tweets-per-second moments, but with people being more easily and instantly connected, even the most obscure content can rapidly be doing laps of the world thanks to the power of digital sharing.
My favourite viral moment from last year is undoubtedly the Fenton the dog video, where the man later revealed to be editorial consultant Max Findlay hopelessly calls and chases after his labrador who is on the rampage in Richmond Park, much to the terror of the indigenous deer population.