This year’s Super Bowl generated a whole lot of chatter.  Forgotten lyrics, funny (and controversial commercials), and the football game itself continue to grab headlines days later.  It may or may not surprise you, then, that Super Bowl XLV helped set a record when it came to sports-related tweets.

A post on the official Twitter Blog announced this afternoon, "[D]uring the final moments of the game, fans sent 4,064 Tweets per second (TPS) – the highest TPS for any sporting event.  That spike shattered the previous record in the sporting world: the 3,283 TPS sent during Japan’s 3-1 victory over Denmark during last summer’s World Cup."

Then the post continued, "In fact, Twitter users shattered that record six times over the course of the game – including early touchdowns by the Packers and Steelers and throughout the halftime show."

You should be able to glean additional information from the graph below.  Predictably, there was a spike following a field goal.  Also, the arrival of Slash helped get Twitter users interested in the halftime show, with Usher’s subsequent appearance drawing even more people in.

All of the Super Bowl hoopla couldn’t add up to the creation of an all-time Twitter usage record, however.  The record of 6,939 tweets per second Japanese users set four seconds after midnight on January 1st stands by a significant margin.

That fact might be of some comfort to Christina Aguilera and Groupon employees, at least.