14 DAY TRIAL // Twitter records are meant to be broken and most don't seem to last very long. Every time a huge event throws Twitter into a frenzy and has people talking like never before, something else comes along and blows it out of the water.
Twitter has just announced that American footballer Tim Tebow managed to set a new world record for sports-related tweets. He would have set an overall record if it wasn't for one small detail.
"Last night @TimTebow lead the @Denver_Broncos to an overtime playoff win and a new sports Tweets per second record: 9420," Twitter wrote.
Tim Tebow has been developing quite a reputation this season in the NFL and the game was the culmination of several other impressive feats.
When he threw an 80-yard touchdown pass winning the game for the Denver Broncos, Twitter went wild.
The surge in activity was enough to topple any of the last year's big events. Twitter started out sooner than expected with its 2011 review, in early December, and compiled a list of the most explosive events.
Beyoncé's pregnancy at the MTV VMA's lead to 8,868 tweets per second at its peak, the biggest event of 2011 at the time Twitter published the list. Several other events also led to a surge in activity, any of them enough to beat 2010's TPS record.
But Tebow's 9,420 TPS would have been enough for a new record, so early in 2012, were it not for a couple of things, the Japanese love Twitter and the Japanese love anime.
Put the two together and you get the current standing tweets per second record of 25,088 set on December 9th during a TV airing of Hayao Miyazaki’s Castle in the Sky. If Twitter had waited to compile its 2011 review until 2011 was actually over, it would have made it to the top of the list of most explosive tweets.