Akemashite omedetou gozaimasu!
Meaning “Happy New Year!” in Japanese, it’s the message that set a new record for most number of tweets per second just four seconds after midnight in Japan on January 1st. At that moment, users published 6,939 tweets/sec, more than doubling the previous record of 3,283 tweets/sec, set when Japan defeated Denmark in the World Cup last summer.
The data represents a great milestone for the slowly maturing microblogging service, as it continually aims to be the go-to place for real-time information.
It’s not as epically beautiful as Facebook’s visualization of the world’s social graph, but Twitter has posted a video that represents worldwide tweets as 2011 swept across the world:
Twitter wasn’t the only one to break a record over the holiday season.
Over New Years’ weekend, users uploaded a record 750 million photos to Facebook. Dwarfing nearly every other service on the Web, including dedicated photo sites, Facebook sees over 100 million photos added to its site daily. To match those incredible usage rates, the social network has been fleshing out its photo service, with the help of the brilliant team from Divvyshot, by fine-tuning the upload system and even testing face recognition features.
Finally, Zynga’s CityVille continued capturing more and more users on Facebook, making it the first app to best FarmVille’s record of 83.7 million users set in March 2010. Right now, CityVille has 90.7 million monthly users, a huge win for Zynga, still easily the biggest and most successful developer on the Facebook platform.
