The World Cup Twitter Record

August 2nd, 2010 | by: chris | View Comments

A historic milestone was hit in the world of Twitter: 20 billion short little bursts, 19.9 of which belong to Darren Bent.

But in the process of learning about Twitterstones, we’ve found this surprising little nugget:

Twitter’s popularity in Japan has soared in the past year with the company estimating that the Japanese send about 12% of all tweets worldwide, second only to the US. One reason for this surge is that it is possible to say much more in Japanese than in English within Twitter’s 140 character limit. Twitter activity reached an all time high of 3,283 tweets per second during the Japan-Denmark game in this year’s World Cup.

Knowing absolutely nothing about Twitter or how it works at the technological level, I do know this: if Japan-Denmark is your high watermark, things may not be going as planned.

Though I also have a theory that most tweets were simply a product of people fainting onto their keyboards and inadvertently hitting send after Honda’s free kick.