New Year’s Eve set a new Twitter record: 6,939 tweets per second sent

1 January didn’t just ring in a new year, it rang in a new record for the number of tweets-per-second sent.

According to figures from Twitter, the Japanese sent 6,939 tweets-per-second as midnight chimed at the start of 2011. The figure is nealry double the previous record, which was 3,283 tweets-per-second, set last summer during  Japan’s victory against Denmark in the soccer World Cup.

It’s proof that the Japanese love their Twitter, but the whole world was at it. This video shows how “Happy New Year” tweets followed the timezones around the planet as the new year was ushered in. As Twitter notes in its blog post today: “The circle over Tokyo gets so big it nearly swallows Japan.” Forget Godzilla, this was a New Years Tweetzilla.