And the scoop goes to Twitter

The story of Osama Bin Laden’s death went viral on Twitter 45 minutes before President Barack Obama made the announcement on television at The White House at 11:35 Sunday evening.

When news surfaced that President Obama was to deliver a speech on TV, Twitterverse went into overdrive with speculation on the content of the speech.

A report by Mashable released early Monday morning said that 40 percent of Americans received the news of Bin Laden’s death on Twitter.

CNN’s Steve Brusk was the first to tweet that it was over a security issue. Soon—and on Twitter, soon is as little as a nanosecond—people were spreading the first credible source, Keith Urbahn, the former chief of staff for former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who tweeted “I’m told by a reputable person they have killed Osama Bin Laden.”

As Mr. Brusk’s and Mr. Urbahn’s tweets were re-tweeted, Twitter recorded a spike of 4,000 tweets per second.

Against this backdrop stood television anchors, on standby, with the same information but hesitant to break the news on as mass a medium as TV prior to Mr. Obama’s speech.

CBS, for example, waited 16 minutes before tweeting the news. In Twitter’s timeline, that is a lifetime.

In related news, an unsuspecting Tweeter in Abbotabad, Pakistan, Sohaib Athar who tweets under the name ReallyVirtual, was tweeting details of the raid. Unbeknownst to him, he tweeted about the operation the world would soon come to know led to the death of bin Laden.

His number of followers has grown by 18,000 (last count). He became a trending topic on Twitter to which he comically tweeted: “Interesting, I didn't think my name would trend on twitter before releasing a couple of rock albums and a few award-winning software....”

Interestingly enough Abbotabad too became a trending subject on Twitter.

This only confirms the power of the social media, of which Twitter seems to be leading the revolution, if not in reality then certainly in virtual reality. It also shows how media outlets have had to alter their thinking and adapt it to new times.

(Muna Khan of Al Arabiya can be reached at: [email protected])