Visualization of how the Urbahn tweet – which broke the news of Osama's death – spread on Twitter

Most people know the story about Keith Urbahn, the former chief of staff to Donald Rumsfeld, being the very first person in the world to break the news about the U.S. had killing Osama Bin Laden. He did this with via Twitter, starting a cascading flow of information. The tweet instantly went  viral, causing the one of the largest traffic flows that Twitter has ever seen.

Social Flow, a social media optimization company, created this visualization of how the Urbahn tweet spread. From SocialFlow:

"At SocialFlow we’ve analyzed the effects of timing and topicality within social streams. In this study we looked at 14.8 million tweets and bitly links with the goal of reaching an understanding on how timing, along with other core dynamics can amplify the reach of a single tweet to a massive scale. Below is a visualization of the network graph showing the spread of Keith Urbahn’s single speculative tweet across users on Twitter."