MTV Awards tops Twitter's 2011 tweets per second
Deaths of Steve Jobs and Osama bin Laden fail to make top 5 in list of events that captured the interest of Twitter users the most this year.
As 2011 draws to a close, Twitter has given us a snapshot of what events in the past 12 months seemed to have captured our interest the most.
Twitter's version of the Year in Review lists prominent events throughout the year along with the tweets they generated per second worldwide on the microblogging site.
It may surprise you to learn that the October 6 death of Steve Jobs was not No. 1 in per-second tweets; indeed, it didn't even make the top 5. Its 6,049 tweets per second were about a 1,000 shy of the per-second tweets generated by Jobs' resignation as Apple CEO on August 25.
The Japanese earthquake and tsunami on March 11 (5,530) and the May 2 death of Osama bin Laden (5,106) also didn't crack the top 5 news events by tweets per second.
The No. 1 event on Twitter's Year in Review was the August 28 MTV Video Music Awards with 8,868 tweets per second, followed by the September 20 execution of Troy Davis. The top 5 rounds out with the twin July 17 events of the end of FIFA Women's World Cup (7,196) and Brazil's elimination from Copa America (7,166), along with New Years wishes (6,939).
With the exception of Davis execution, the events that motivated Twitter users the most were events of sports and leisure instead of hard news, begging the question of whether we view Twitter as more of an entertainment medium rather than news-delivery device.