The death of Apple founder Steve Jobs provoked an online outpouring of
The death of Apple founder Steve Jobs provoked an online outpouring of grief likely to smash records, an Australian firm said Thursday as mourners took to the Internet to pay tribute to the tech guru.
Social media sites sagged under the weight of Jobs-related posts, with five of the top ten topics trending worldwide on Twitter about the Apple pioneer, including #ThankYouSteve and #iSad.
Two of his catchcries, “Think Different” and “Stay Hungry” were also top of the trends, with the chatter so immense it caused Twitter to seize up, dispatching its famous “fail whale” to indicate a traffic jam.
Social media analysts said it was likely to break records for the most talked-about Internet event of all time, with monitoring agency SR7 estimating it had hit a massive 10,000 tweets per second and was likely to rise.
“It has the potential to pass the all-time social media interactivity level, particularly on the Twitter platform where it will probably be in excess of 10,000 tweets per second,” Peter Fraser, co-founder of Australian social media monitoring agency SR7 told AFP.
The present record — 8,868 tweets per second — was set when US singer Beyonce announced her pregnancy at the MTV awards.
By comparison, the killing of Osama bin Laden saw about 5,000 tweets per second, and Michael Jackson’s 2009 death produced about 493 tweets per second.
Source AFP