Steve Jobs death sparks Twitter surge

The death of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs did not set a record on Twitter yesterday, but it still resonated around the microblogging site in all corners of the world.

There had been suggestion that the news Jobs had lost his long battle with pancreatic cancer would result in Twitter seeing a record 10,000 posts per second, as people paid their respects to the man who masterminded the Mac, the iPhone, the iPad and the iPod.

In fact, a Twitter spokesperson confirmed that the news peaked at a rate of 6,049 tweets per second (TPS), which is more than the around-5,000 for the death of Osama Bin Laden in May, but below the current record of 8,868 tweets per second, set for when singer Beyoncé announced her pregnancy at the MTV VMAs.

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The Steve Jobs tweets peaked below the 7,196 for Japan's victory against the US in the Women's World Cup, and Brazil's elimination from the Copa America, at 7,166 TPS, both in July. It was also fewer than the 6,939 TPS during New Year's Eve 2011.

However, the cumulative number of messages posted on Twitter about Steve Jobs is understood to be high, with AllTwitter reporting that 15% of tweets yesterday included the term 'Jobs'.

The massive flood of messages even slowed the microblogging website to a crawl at times, producing error messages saying it was over capacity.

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