As is the trend with breaking news stories in the last three-to-four years, each one seems to top the next in how social media was used to cover, spread and react to the event. Last night's news about Osama Bin Laden finally being killed began and ended on Twitter. From a Pakastani man documenting the raid in real time, to the first unofficial news of the story being leaked well before the President addressed the nation, to four thousand tweets-per-second being published about the news, television and newspapers took a back seat to social media once again.
Another pattern of breaking news is use of new tools to help us capture and share the story each time. Last night some news outlets harnessed a powerful new curation tool Storify to pull together people's reactions to the news in one easily consumable timeline. Storify enables "authors" to combine original content with social media curation to tell a story through the eyes of many. I think this is just the beginning of us all following big historical events through quickly curated Storify timelines.
Here's my own coverage of last night's news, as told through my social media community. I've broken down into a few sections: raw reactions & discussion, an overview of how people used different social media platforms to share & celebrate the news, and some interesting longer-form blog articles about how social media played its part in spreading the news.
