The Super Bowl Sets Twitter Records, Only Shadowed by the Japanese

Twitter and TV go hand in hand like, well, Twitter and TV. People are getting increasingly accustomed to commenting on the site during big TV events in particular, effectively sharing the experience with their Twitter friends.

The latest Super Bowl, as you might expect, did not disappoint. In fact, again as you might expect, it set a new record for a sporting event. Were it not for Japan, it would have been the most popular event on Twitter of all time.

The Super Bowl generated a peak of 12,233 tweets per second, right at the end of the game. The second peak was during Madonna's half time performance, which generated 10,245 tweets per second (TPS).

The end of the game managed to canalize most of the attention. People tweeted on average over 10,000 tweets per second for the last three minutes of the game.

Again, taking Japan out of the equation, the latest Super Bowl would sit at the top of the TPS chart, followed by another recent football event, Tim Tebow's overtime playoff win last month which generated 9,402 TPS.

2011's top event, Beyonce's pregnancy during the MTV VMA's generated 8,868 tweets per second.

All of these numbers would be impressive were it not for the actual current record, 25,088 tweets per second set during an airing of the "Castle in the Sky" anime on Japanese TV, in December last year.

The Japanese have been avid Twitter users and they seem to get excited in bulk. 2011's New Year Day set a huge TPS record that was eventually beaten in 2011. But it doesn't seem that the current Japanese record is in any threat.

The only predictable event that might topple it is the 2012 Summer Olympics in London. With hundreds of events unfolding, it is bound to generate quite a lot of action. Some Japanese athlete or team might be able to get pass the 25,000 tweets per second mark.