Sina Weibo broke records with the ringing in of the Chinese New Year this weekend which saw more than 32,312 messages sent per second according to The Next Web. The utter volume of messages saw 481,207 messages sent during the first minute of the new year.

As previously reported by us, Weibo is the only alternative to Twitter in the country and the two services that offer it, Sina and Tencent, both claim more than 200 million users each. It was Sina Weibo that shattered all previous records. Tencent Weibo was not mentioned in the report, but I’m sure they were adding their own impressive numbers as well.

The record held by Twitter is when Japanese tweeters took to the service during the climactic moment of Castle in the Sky. That event garnered over 11,000 tweets per second.

It still remains to be seen if this trend will continue as the government plans to make users register under their real names. It may make less people join the service or send less messages, but it probably won’t stop the Chinese from using social media as a form of communication.

While such descriptions will remain only superlatives, a trio of students from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands decided to turn the idea of “the biggest” on its ear and, five months and over $6,000 later, have literally built the largest video game controller in the world.

The gargantuan controller, certified by the Guinness World Records, was unveiled for the first time today at the Liverpool Street station in London as part of today’s release of Guiness World Records Gamer’s Edition 2012.

The design of the controller is based on the classic NES model and, yes, is completely function. You might have some trouble toggling those Tetris pieces with this controller, though, as it literally requires two people just to operate it. Well, I guess you could try to play a game by yourself using this controller but, I mean, if you think you can do that you might as well try sprinting to Jupiter or eating dinosaur meat because… ah, c’mon, you’re just not going to be able to do it. Admit it. This warlock is 30 TIMES the size of the original NES controller! If you were to stand it up on its end, it would stand 167 feet tall. To put the truly Brobdingnagian device into perspective, The Daily Mail shared these photos of the controller on display today:

It almost looks as if you might need more than two people to go stomping Koopa Troopas. And because you are dying to know how (un)tenable the remote is, Gamezine was on hand at the exhibition to give the controller a try and had this to say about the experience:

Within its pleasingly chunky wooden frame, the giant pad uses light-sensitive technology to detect when the buttons and D-pad have been pressed. Commuters looked on aghast as Gamezine tried its hand at evergreen classic Super Mario Bros. Despite some frantic button clobbering and careful ‘communication’ (shouting), we failed to make it past level 1 – but it was a memorable experience that brought a new dimension to a classic game, even if you need a sizable spare room to store it in.

I don’t know about you, but the image of grown ups shouting at a funny 8-bit video game in a crowded subway station while stomping away on a HUGE controller puts an incredibly sincere grin on my face.

In case you were curious about what the competition looked like for gaining entry into the famed Guinness World Records, here’s a look at a couple of guys from G4 who constructed “the world’s largest” NES controller a few years ago.

I think somebody’s got their work cut out for them. Game on, gamers.

Today, Twitter announced that we have a new tweets per second king in the realm of sports – Tim Tebow’s playoff win hit 9420 TPS last night.

To put this 9420 tweets per second in perspective, last year’s Super Bowl set the then-record for sporting events with 4,064 tweets per second. Either this is a testament to the ridiculous popularity (and hatred) of Tim Tebow or the growth of Twitter in the last year – maybe both.

Here are some other huge (non-sporting) events that Tebow beat when it comes to tweets per second: The death of Osama bin Laden (5,106); the Japanese New Year (6,939); both Steve Jobs’ resignation as Apple CEO and his death (7,064 and 6,049, respectively); and the “Beyonce’s pregnant” moment at the 2011 VMAs (8,868).

Tebow has become a hot topic of discussion on the interwebs, and it’s no doubt due largely in part to his extremely vocal Christianity which he is both loved and loathed for, depending on who you ask. Sports news organizations’ “cycles of Tebow” news exacerbate the situation. Anyone who has followed the NFL this season has probably heard more about Tebow than most other players combined.

So when Tebow beats a favored team, in the playoffs, in incredibly dramatic fashion – it’s no wonder he nearly broke Twitter.

Here’s what Twitter has been saying about Tebow since Sunday evening:

Tebow is going to have to do a lot if he wants to break the overall tweets per second record. That belongs to the television screening of the Japanese film “Castle in the Sky,” which garnered a ridiculous 25,088 tweets per second.

Maybe if Tebow can best Tom Terrific, who knows?

Apple Inc. shares have been markedly higher today than they’ve ever been. The first peak occurred this morning around 10AM EST when shares increased to $427.18. The peak was short-lived as the value quickly dipped down but still hovered well above any previously observed levels. Still, this alone would have been a milestone for Apple but the good news from the NYSE pit wasn’t done dishing out the good news yet.

Roughly 45 minutes later, shares of Apple bounced back above the $427 mark and bested the previous record set earlier in the morning by peaking at $427.75. The shares dipped down again but have remained above the $423 watermark throughout the day so far. A screenshot of the rollercoaster thrill road known as Apple Makes Record Amounts Of Money is below.

One has to wonder if ChangeWave’s report from earlier today that revealed people have got the iPhone-lust in their eyes more than ever has driven the boost in Apple’s shares. Maybe it was the fact this is the five-year anniversary of the first iPhone’s debut. Maybe speculators are just excited because it’s CES week and anything related to technology and being cool makes people wanna get rich. Maybe it’s all of these factors or none of these factors (my money’s on the ChangeWave report, really). Whatever the cause, some stock market paladins will have some pretty well-lined coffers at the end of today.

Flurry reports that people didn’t just tip-toe into the mobile app waters, either – they dove right in with a 60% increase of app downloads for iOS and Android devices during the final week of December 25 – 31 and, for the first time, posted a watermark above 1 billion downloads for a single week.

As much as the Christmas spirit can be said to be the instigator for all of this app downloading due to the gifting of new iOS and Android devices, it can’t be singled out as the sole responsible agent. App downloads in China, Sourth Korea and Japan – countries wherein Christmas is not so widely observed – contributed over 100 million apps downloaded in the final week of 2011. Flurry points out that “South Korea and Japan have the 4th and 5th largest smart device installed bases of all countries, yet they ranked 7th and 10th, respectively, for downloads over the record week.” The full data stats of app downloads for the last week of 2011 are below.

So given that this is probably more of a market swell than a holiday trend, Flurry says that we shouldn’t be surprised if this rate of downloaded apps doesn’t repeat a few times in 2012:

Looking forward to 2012, Flurry expects breaking the one-billion-download-barrier per week will become more common-place. While iOS and Android growth continues to amaze, the market is still by all measures relatively nascent. We look forward to continuing to chart the unprecedented adoption of mobile computing devices, usage of applications and the way in which this technology is changing consumer behavior worldwide.

One thing that Flurry didn’t point out is that these statistics may just be correlations without actually demonstrating causality. Sure, more active devices anticipates more app downloads but even then that doesn’t explicitly explain the bulge of apps downloaded between Christmas morning and New Year’s Day. Given that the lull between the two holidays is typically filled with abundant free time and possibly awkward family gatherings, people likely downloaded a lot more apps this week for the same reason they always have: they were bored. But all those new phones probably helped out exponentially, as well.

Did you get a new phone? Did you download apps last week and thus contribute to the record-breaking swell of downloads in a single week? What’d ya download? Let us know below.

Ever since Cyber Monday kicked off the blitzkrieg of online shopping this year by becoming the most lucrative shopping day ever, the amount of money spent by shoppers has consistently trumped every corresponding week from 2010. In this year and last, sales steadily increased leading up to the big Day of Unwrapping (i.e., Christmas Day) with the penultimate week seeing a huge gush of money from consumers. I’d suspect that the week before Christmas is a huge shopping day for online retailers because those present-buying procrastinators wanna make sure the gifts arrive in time. This year, however, has seen a pronounced increase in money being spent for each interval that comScore recorded.

Increases in online retail sales have been observed to increase with each passing year recently so the fact that people spent more money this year than 2010 isn’t completely surprising. What makes this year so significant is just how crazy Americans went with their holiday shopping. It’s like everybody wasn’t quite content with merely spending some more money this year, so Americans decided that they didn’t like too many figures in their bank accounts and spent a lot more money. $6.3 billion worth of a lot more!

I guess some people think this is good news, but that more money than ever is being spent online raises an interesting question: given the tax loophole associated with online sales, how much tax revenue was lost in last week’s boom (and for the total $32 billion spent this holiday season, really). I’d like to see that analysis. I bet the different tiers of government want to see those stats, too. A loss of tax monies like that might not matter so much at a federal level, but that could have some heavy impact on struggling municipalities.

Anyways. So how’s your holiday shopping going? Anybody out there contribute to last week’s eruption of online shopping? Let us know with your comments below.

In case any of you didn’t already agree, Japan offered up another example of their awesomeness by blowing away the record for tweets per second over this past weekend. The previous record had been established earlier this year when legions of Beyoncé fans tweeted a deluge about Babyoncé. It’s fitting that Japan should reclaim the title since they had been the previous owners of the tweets-per-second record before Babyoncé exploded on the Twitters in August. Then, during the MTV Video Music Awards, Beyoncé fans posted 8,868 tweets in one second, besting the record 7,196 tweets submitted when Japan defeated the United States in the FIFA Women’s World Cup finals.

So how many tweets per second did Japanese tweeters post? An astounding 11,349!

Now what, you may be asking yourself, occasioned the staggering amount of tweets from Japan? Hayao Miyazaki’s animated classic, Laputa: Castle in The Sky, which is an annual television broadcast in Japan during this time of year. The raison d’être of the tweeting fusillade came during the climax of the movie, in which the two main characters, Pazu and Sheeta, cast the one-world spell, “Balse,” in order to defeat the villain. Viewers of the movie had readied their Twitter silos to post the “Balse” tweet in unison with the two characters.

And post they did! So what does nearly 12K tweets in one second look like? It looks a little something like this spire of data:

You’ll notice in the graph that the “Balse” tweets peaked at 14,594. That’s actually the grand total number of tweets worldwide that contained the word “Balse;” the 11,349 figure is specific to Japan. In the United States, I imagine this being the equivalent of tweeters posting thousands of “Fuuuuudddddgggggge” at the precise scene when Ralphie swears in front of his dad in the annual broadcast of A Christmas Story. So good luck, festive Americans, trying to top that whopper of a record.

And I firmly believe that any of my friends that were tweeting about other things were doing so simply to be some sort of trend-bucking contrarian. Sorry, I don’t care about your cat. I know he is curled up inside the dryer. Sorry, I have real news to read about.

But it seems as those people not tweeting about Osama Bin Laden were in the vast minority, as Twitter announced today that last night a new record was set for sustained Tweets per second. I’ll let them tell you:

That is a whole lotta activity. The highest peak was an staggering 5,106 TPS at 11pm, just before President Obama made his speech. As many as this is, it still doesn’t come close to the all time spike in TPS – 6,939 just minutes after the new year in Japan. It does beat the TPS spike during Super Bowl XLV, which set a sporting event record at 4,064.

Below is the graph of the Tweets Per Second between 9:30 pm and 12:30 am. Many people have said in the aftermath of last night’s news that Twitter was their go-to for information. Many didn’t even follow traditional TV coverage except to watch Obama’s speech. Twitter already has popularity, but last night it may have just gained total legitimacy.

Apparently, I am not alone.  Saturday was Foursquare day (4/16 – 4² = 16….get it?) and people all over were busying checking-in – ferociously.  According to a tweet from founder Dennis Crowley, over 3 million check-ins were recorded on Saturday alone.  That dwarfs the previous one day record of 275,000.  That’s over a 1000% increase.

This year wasn’t the first time that Foursquare day has been celebrated, but before it was definitely more widely recognized among a geek contingent.  This year, 14 different cities officially declared the holiday, including a very highly publicized declaration in Foursquare’s home base of NYC.

Minneapolis was another high profile declaration:

Last week, an article written by Goby CEO Mark Watkins got quite a bit of play.  In it, he projected the decline of the “check-in” as a singular strategy for a company and offered that companies that relied almost solely on check-ins would have to offer much more in ways of deals, recommendation and other services to stay alive.

In the article, he outlines basic reasons why he thinks people check-in; to help people remember things for instance.  He then explains why he thinks that isn’t something that is going to sustain long-term growth.  Another factor for him is the “game factor.”  As long as check-ins are a “game,” they will not have long-term sustainability.

Although the record totals for Foursquare day admittedly occurred on the company’s flagship day, they are nonetheless impressive.  Foursquare also recently announced it has topped the 8 million total user mark.  And with cities all over jumping on the wagon and officially declaring 4/16 Foursquare day, it looks like the buzz for this check-in driven company isn’t declining in the least.

Also of note, entertainment check-in app GetGlue just announced its own milestone.  The company just surpassed 1 million users.  At least for now, the forecast looks good for at least some of the check-in based companies.

Sites like TauMed, Revolution Health, Kosmix RightHealth, and Microsoft’s HealthVault came into existence to address what some see as a growing need for centralized and portable health information. Google aspired to do more, ambitiously aiming for a much broader reach into medical records.

We may finally get a look at what’s been happening at Google Health. The service experienced some drama when its leader, Adam Bosworth, ditched Google in favor of a startup with similar health record aims. Since then, there has been little of substance about it beyond the occasional Marissa Mayer interview.

But with SMX West in full swing practically in Google’s backyard, it appears they will use the event to announce the opening of Google Health’s doors. The Wall Street Journal thinks so, claiming this will happen; Google did not comment.

They have a chicken or egg question to answer about the Google Health service. People will be invited to plug their health details into Google. In turn, Google will try to get healthcare providers and their myriad record keeping services to supply information about those patients.

The main idea focuses on having all the relevant health information, including treatments, prescriptions, and medical histories, in one place. This helps people who may be referred to specialist doctors or surgeons for assessments of conditions beyond what a general practitioner can determine.

Much has been made about the potential for accessing medical information in an emergency. The scenario of an unconscious patient being wheeled into an emergency room, someone who could benefit from one treatment over another due to pre-existing medical conditions, appeals to those who favor easily accessible histories.

The problem there comes from letting the doctors know such records for a patient exists. How would they be able to find this out from someone who’s unconscious and possibly without their ID on them?

That’s just one of many complexities a health record keeping service might face. The daunting task of assimilating patient data from healthcare professionals in multiple formats might be the most difficult, next to getting people to trust such a service.

Google Health will need to attract a lot of people willing to put their information in place. That way they can go to doctors and hospitals and say, look, all of these people want to be part of this, will you be part of it too?