World Cup kicks Twitter 'tweets' to record high

Twitter said Friday that World Cup football kicked the number of "tweets" fired off at the micro-blogging service to a record high of 3,283 per second.

The winning spike in tweets came right after a referee's whistle ended a Thursday match in which Japan beat Denmark 3-1.

The previous "tweets-per-second" record of 3,085 was set last week after the Los Angeles Lakers defeated the Boston Celtics in the final game of US National Basketball Association championships.

"We continued to see big spikes in Tweets following goals in the World Cup," Twitter said in a message announcing the new 'TPS' record.

The rate of tweeting typically averages 750-per-second, according to the San Francisco based startup.

The micro-blogging service has exploded in popularity since it was launched in March 2006 and Twitter chief operating officer Dick Costello said recently that it now attracts 190 million visitors a month.

Last week, Twitter warned users to expect outages as it copes with the heavy traffic during the World Cup.

(c) 2010 AFP