Super Bowl, Madonna Light Up Twitter

But both couldn't come close to the record set by an anime film from 1986.

Last night, a bunch of 300-lb men from New York beat a bunch of 300-lb men from the Boston area in what will go down as one of the most entertaining – and confusing – Super Bowls of all time. The game also dominated everyone's favourite real-time social media site, Twitter, as two instances – Madonna's half-time performance and the Giants' game-winning drive – eclipsed the 10,000 tweets-per-second mark (tps? t/s? It's up to you, internet!). Madonna's actually-pretty-amazing half-time show, helped along by M.I.A., Nicki Minaj, those two bums from LMFAO, and a slackliner (it's a thing now, we suppose), hit 10,245 tweets per second, and averaged more than 8,000 tweets per second across five minutes of her performance. Not bad for a 53-year-old singer whose creativity peaked around the time Joe Montana was still slinging footballs. The Giant's dying-minutes drive, punctuated by Mario Mannigham's 38-yard reception that will probably be seared into the brain of Pats' coach Bill Belichick for the rest of his life, hit 12,233 tweets per second.

Those two moments edged out Tim Tebow's game-winning touchdown against the Pittsburgh Steelers four weeks ago during an AFC wildcard game and Beyonce's proclamation at the MTV Video Music Awards that she's pregnant. What they did not beat was the Dec. 9 broadcast of the anime movie Castle in the Sky in Japan, which hit 25,088 tweets per second – more than double what Mannigham's contribution to the NFL's history books could generate. When added to the world-record 337 chicken wings that Takeru Kobayashi ate in half hour on Friday, it just goes to show even in areas in which Americans typically excel – gluttony, wasting time on social media – the Japanese can do it twice as well.