Slashdot Mirror
Bin Laden's Death Causes Twitter Record
gabbo529 writes "Twitter has been a source of breaking news since its inception five years ago, and the social network was used at a high rate last night with the death of Osama Bin Laden. [Sunday night] saw the highest sustained rate of Tweets ever. From 10:45 p.m. to 2:20 a.m. ET, there was an average of 3,000 Tweets per second."
A joke only UK readers will get:
Who says you can't take a Bin out on a bank holiday.
Brum tish!
I was going to go for a joke about how dastardly Bin Laden must have been, to provoke a massive DoS attack against western communications infrastructure just by getting shot.
Then I realized that we were talking about Twitter.
Can you even measure that?
So the question I have now is, was Michael Jackson less significant or did the Jackson craze lead to more people knowing about Twitter and thus more people available to tweet about Bid Laden? The world may never know.
Well, Bin Laden had taken over Hitler's spot of "Evilest Guy Alive" for quite a few years. It's no wonder his death is much discussed.
As someone whose persona was so large, and whose death was always going to be controversial, I guess that means he joins Hitler, Elvis, and Michael Jackson on the island of dead people who are regularly sighted.
if you think the source is reliable and expert enough to really give you news. Given that there was an article on the front page about how people find the news they want, I don't know if Twitter gets around that same problem.
"To stop the terrorists."
It took the death of the most hated man alive to finally put an end to the supremacy of Justin Beiber tweets.
As of Monday CNN was reporting over 5000 tweets/sec at it's peak. Today is Tuesday. Why is information from Sunday being used? Why can't up to date articles be used around here?
There were an amazing amount of comments here in the first thread about Bin Laden's death... ~2000? What's the record at /.?
No, no sig. Really.
ThePromenader
Osama Bin Laden may be dead, but without Ewoks & a John Williams music score to celebrate this mighty victory with, it feels kind of empty.
There was also a Canadian federal election yesterday, with many surprising results which were all reported in this exact time slot. I know that's not as exciting as a bunch of commandos shooting a guy, but if we're going to talk facts, let's get them straight.
So you don't know what the word "sustained" means. Congrats.
What exactly was stopping him before? I mean he regularly put out videos to sources that couldn't easily be controlled by the US Government. If he has some grand secret to release that would hurt the US then why wouldn't he have already used it?
Because the guy who files the TPS reports didn't use the new cover sheet.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
.. for the same piece of news, feels like a measure of the redundancy of the network's data traffic.
Who cares.
I suspect his "secret" isn't really a secret, it's just how close his ties to the West were before the relationship soured. The reason he didn't talk about this prior to his death is that it was mutually embarassing. If he was captured, he'd have little to lose in reminding us that we're the ones who trained him and set him loose on the world, while it would still be potentially embarassing to our governments to have several days of that blazoned across every newspaper.
Counter-Terrorists Win!
How does it feel to be a liar with pants constantly on fire?
OBL's death generates 27 tangential Slashdot stories.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
My services can do 20000 transactions per second, per server, per core. - by Anonymous Coward
That's nothing - I can ignore all ten billion people in the world simultaneously in no time at all.
Go ahead, test me - there's a "Reply to This" button beneath my post.
The article says 5000 per second by the time Obama finished his speech
And the death of bin Laden is no exception. Those 3000 tweets/second are not carrying "breaking news" of any kind; they are people making jokes, political talking-points or simply repeating rumours and hearsay. Even the article states that most of the tweets came after the news appeared on TV.
Fact is, the overwhelming majority of people on twitter have no first-hand experience of the event, and those that do have first-hand experience are not about to leak any details of it. All the good information is collected on websites like the BBC, not on Twitter, so if I want news, I'll stick with a proper news source.
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
Millions of wanna-be reality stars tweeting every banality. Hell, even the so-called live-tweeting was just a resident complaining about chopper noise.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
What, did hell freeze over?
My fault, actually - for a while now instead of "when hell freezes over" I've been saying "when they get bin Laden." Please convey my apologies to the rest of the people down there - I wouldn't wish AOL on even my worst enemy.
What's the matter - short on virgins?
To be more precise, they want to kill everyone who does not believe as fervently as they do in the same interpretation of their religion.
Citation needed.
OK, here it is.
Sometimes you need to read a bit more than the huffpost in order to broaden your point of view. That "western support for the dictators who run governments in the middle east" line is a bit tired, don't you think? Could you ([citation needed], of course) point out which "western" governments support the dictatorships of Syria, Iran, and Gaza?
It's truly ironic how someone can talk about "gross oversimplification" in the same sentence they talk about "western support" for dictatorships.
I saw this retracted on World News Now this morning. They mentioned another event getting around 5500 tweets/minute. I think it was the Japan quake.
I am a walrus!
if past wikileaks leaks hints at much, i'd say not a whole lot.
All the good information is collected on websites like the BBC, not on Twitter, so if I want news, I'll stick with a proper news source.
A lot of people would have first heard about it from twitter (or another social network), and then gone to a proper news source for conformation and actual details. I guess thats the point of this story (if there is a point to it, apart from how much the network can handle at once)