News of Osama Bin Laden's Death Truly a Global Twitter Event

Earlier today, Twitter's public relations team announced that word of Osama Bin Laden's death elicited the longest sustained rate of mass activity on the site ever with more than 3,000 tweets per second between 10:45 p.m. and 2:20 a.m. EST. (For comparison, the most recent Super Bowl sustained Twitter activity at that level for only 20 minutes.)

Now Sysomos, a company that monitors social media activity, has mapped the tweets. Despite the late hour in the United States, by the time President Obama finished his address from the White House, more than 500,000 tweets had been sent (and 507 news articles published). About two hours later, that number had climbed to 860,000, according to Sysomos. And 12 hours after the tweeting began around 9:45 p.m. EST, 2.2 million tweets had been sent. Those tweets came from all over the world, as Sysomos' map of activity on the network shows. Clearly, the most tweets originated in the United States and across Europe, but look at the interest coming from Central America, the southeastern edge of Australia and, yes, the Middle East.