Swine Flu Hysteria: 10,000 Tweets Per Hour

Tweets about “Swine Flu” are now at 10,000 per hour, up from an average of a few thousand earlier in the day

To be honest, I haven’t been paying much attention to Swine Flu and have pretty much written it off as this year’s SARS or West Nile Virus, unlikely to impact me (famous last words!).

But in the age of Twitter(), hysteria over the latest potential end of humanity virus is spreading … well, like a virus. Trendrr, which tracks trends across social media sites, just sent over the numbers, and they are off the charts - literally.

As you can see in the chart below, Tweets about “Swine Flu” are now at 10,000 per hour, up from an average of a few thousand earlier in the day. Of course, this is the snowball effect that Twitter can have on a given subject, whether it be Christian Bale, Susan Boyle, Ashton Kutcher or other viral phenomenons that we’ve seen pop up since the microblogging site crossed the chasm so to speak