On Saturday night, legendary R&B singer Whitney Houston passed away at the age of 48, and the Web community expressed their collective grief in ways unique to the medium.
On social networks, people used Spotify, Rdio, and other music apps to broadcast playlists that included Houston’s hits including “I Will Always Love You” and “I Wanna Dance With Somebody.”
According to Topsy, a search engine for trends on Twitter, “Whitney Houston” was tweeted more than 400,000 times in an hour. By 10 p.m. Eastern Time, she’d drawn more than 1.7 million tweets.
The cause of the death wasn’t immediately clear, but that didn’t stop people from speculating. Twitter.com featured six top trending topics worldwide related to the late singer, from titles of her songs and “RIP Whitney Houston” to “crack kills,” a reference to allegations of drug abuse that long swirled around Houston.
Here’s how the Web mourned her:
Photo by asterix611