Bin Laden killing followed by Twitter

Word of bin Laden's death rocketed thru the Net in rapid-fire Twitter messages, Facebook updates, and YouTube video clips. The barrage of tweets was among the highest message-sending outbursts at Twitter, which handled a high number of 6,939 tweets-per-second when New Year's Eve 2010 arrived in Japan. Messages tagged with "osama" and "obl" quickly jumped to the top 2 spots in an inventory of the hottest subjects at the worldwide microblogging service. Stories that US army forces snuffed out the nine / eleven mastermind was allegedly first leaked at Twitter in a public message sent by Keith Urbahn, chief of staff for former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. "So I am told by a credible person they have finished Osama Bin Laden," read a tweet sent by Urbahn roughly an hour before president Obama announced the killing. "Hot damn." An IT advisor in the Pakistan town of Abbottabad, who tweets under the name "ReallyVirtual," seemed to have ignorantly delivered a real time account of the assault that snuffed out bin Loaded . Sohaib Athar commenced tweeting messages about one in the morning local time griping about copters hovering and than a window-rattling blast. His series of messages at Twitter told of a chopper crash, a family dying, and Pakistani army swarming the area. "I am simply a tweeter, awake at the time of the crash," he claimed in a Twitter message at 06:30 GMT on Monday.

"Uh oh, now I am the fellow who live-blogged the Osama raid without knowing it," he tweeted after connecting president Obama's statement to what was happening in his neighborhood. By Monday afternoon in California more than 367,000 folk had "liked" an "Osama bin Loaded is Dead" page at social networking service Facebook. The Facebook page was packed with comments, videos and photos, some claiming to be copies of graphic close-ups of bin Laden's mortally injured body.