News of Michael Jackson drives Tweets

Twitter for breaking rumors, CNN for confirmation

Minutes after TMZ broke the news that Michael Jackson died, I turned to... Twitter, of course.

I didn't turn to Twitter for confirmation, but just to see how many people were Twittering about it. Within a few seconds, more than 5,000 Tweets had streamed in. Within five minutes, 27,000 Tweets were made.  Most Tweets were useless noise, as one can imagine. (They probably also slowed the service down.)

For breaking news, CNN is still the source.