Online revelry at Osama bin Laden's death

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SAN FRANCISCO: Word of Osama bin Laden's death rocketed through the Internet in rapid-fire Twitter messages, Facebook updates, and YouTube video clips.

The number of terse text message "tweets" at Twitter topped 4,000 per second while US President Barack Obama announced that the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks was killed in Pakistan in a surgical strike by a US military team.

The barrage of tweets was among the highest message-sending outbursts at Twitter, which handed a record high number of 6,939 tweets-per-second when New Year's Eve 2010 arrived in Japan.

Messages tagged with "#osama" and "obl" quickly jumped to the top two spots in a list of the hottest topics at the global microblogging service.

"Twitter is our Times Square on this victory day," tweeted New York City journalism school professor Jeff Jarvis, who started his Buzz Machine blog online after being close to the World Trade Center when it was destroyed.

By the time Sunday ended in California more than a 250,000 people had "liked" an "Osama bin Laden is Dead" page at social networking service Facebook.

The Facebook page was packed with comments, videos and pictures, some purporting to be copies of graphic close-ups of bin Laden's mortally wounded body. Many of the comments lambasted the slain Al-Qaeda leader.

"This is an amazing day for the families of 9/11 victims," one Facebook user commented on the page.

Google-owned video sharing website YouTube dedicated nearly a third of its home page to clips related to bin Laden's death and the celebrations breaking out on US streets.

At geo-location service Foursquare, more than 160 people in San Francisco had "checked in" to a "Post-Osama bin Laden World" using their smartphones. (AFP)