- On Sunday, the United States launched one of the most covert raids in recent military history, aimed at taking out the most-wanted man in the world, Osama bin Laden. As just about everyone knows by now, the mission was a success.
The news played out over social media in a number of interesting ways – here are some of the highlights:
- IT contractor Sohaib Athar, inadvertently live-tweeted the United States’ secret raid on Bin Laden’s compound. Athar first noticed helicopters and planes flying over Abbotabad, then started to notice that the helicopters were not Pakistani… and then realized: “Uh oh, now I’m the guy who liveblogged the Osama raid without knowing it.”
- Twitter reached the highest sustained volume of tweets per second in its history, with more than 3000 tweets per second being sent from 10:45 pm to 12:15 am on the evening of May 1, 2011.
- Bin Laden’s compound was added to Google Maps just moments after President Obama announced his death. Here’s a link to the location on Google Maps.
I was on Cheryl Fritze’s show on WILS-1320 Lansing last night to talk about social media and bin Laden’s death – you can listen to an MP3 of the interview here.