Twitter: Thousands tweeted about healthcare ruling

Regardless of how people felt about the Supreme Court's decision on the healthcare reform bill Thursday, they weren't shy about expressing themselves on Twitter.

The microblogging site saw a peak of 13,166 tweets per minute (TPM) at 10:17 a.m., shortly after the court's decision was announced.

For comparison, the only other recent political event that drew that level of tweets all at once was President Obama's State of the Union address in January, which takes place during prime time rather than during the workday and peaked at 14,131 TPM. 

When the House passed the Affordable Care Act in 2010, TPM topped out at 4,022. 

Chart via Twitter:

CHART (w/corrected #SB1070 count): Tweets per minute re: #SCOTUS, #Obamacare, #HCR, #ACA and related terms. twitter.com/gov/status/218…

— Twitter Government (@gov) June 29, 2012

The number of tweets puts the Supreme Court event on par with a sports event. In May, 32,000 tweets per minute were sent at one point during the Champions League Final of European soccer. 

But it doesn't come close to the overall record. In 2011, when singer Beyonce announced her pregnancy on live TV, it set a record of 8,868 tweets per second (TPS), at that time the most TPS ever recorded for a single event. Japan's New Year's celebration this year beat it with 16,000 TPS. 

Some of the most memorable tweets sent Thursday were from Sarah Palin (who rhymed), DNC staffers (who got a little "excited"), and the lawmakers who were fooled by CNN initially misreporting the decision.