How news of bin Laden exploded on Twitter: a visualization

Now, it is well known that the news of the death of Osama bin Laden broke out on Twitter. Chief of staff Donald Rumsfeld, to soft Keith Urbahn, was the first source credible to issue the new Sunday at 10: 24 pm et, although before the President Obama spoke and the Urbahn tweet is the one that went viral. All this we knew - but now, with a comprehensive analysis of 15 million tweets by New York company Social Flow, we can actually see Urbahn position explodes in the Twitterverse. "Less than a minute, more than 80 people had already reissued the message," the company wrote in his blog ticket. "In two minutes, more than 300 responses to the original message were broadcast across the network."

Visualization of social, high flow, also reveals a new and little-known player earlier in the drama of tweet Urbahn: see digital media of New York Times Brian Stelter. It is in the Centre of the second hub of resembling dandelion of retweets, at the bottom right of the image. Other Twitter accounts have played their role passing news of one of these highly influential Tweeters to another, including @ ObamaNews and @ LaughingSquid - the latter being a site based in San Francisco in full of ephemera quirky.

What can we learn from this graph? This reliability, in a universe of tweeters debit all sorts of speculation, is more important than ever. Urbahn, 27, is a not shouting about his links with the insider, but enough people reading his bio that he was likely to have good sources in the Pentagon. And for all Twitter speech, making journalists to us all, it seems that we still want validation to postpone a major media organization.

[More from Mashable: Ben & Jerry made donation of your spare characters of Twitter for a good Cause]

And perhaps - perhaps - the number of followers, that you have on Twitter issues less than that and how active they are. Urbahn did not have a record number of disciples (which then had a little more than 1 000, or about 6,000 less than what it now has), but his tweet alla viral Nevertheless, through these disciples to bat for him. Habel has more than 55,000 supporters and tweets obsessively, but ultimately his influence was slightly less important here than the Urbahn.

"Keith Urbahn was not the first to speculate the death of Osama bin Laden, but he won the confidence of most of the network," writes Flow Social. "And with this, the perfect situation unfolded, where the calendar, the right social-professional public network, with a relevant critical piece of information led to an explosion of public affirmation of its reliability."