The social network collected the most re-tweeted messages from the four-and-a-half hours after the former Apple CEO passed away on Wednesday. Twitter then turned those into a gray-scale mosaic of Jobs, called #thankyousteve, which the company posted to its official Flickr account late yesterday (full size image here).
“#ThankYouSteve for the magic you brought to people’s lives” wrote @_Snape_
“Some of the fire in the universe dimmed tonight. Steve Jobs, thank you for reminding us all what ambition+imagination can do. #ThankYouSteve” posted @DianeSawyer
It’s since been viewed nearly 120,000 times, according to Flickr. The image has also spread to social news site Reddit, where it hit the front page of the site’s million-strong r/pics section earlier today — for all the wrong reasons. (Redditors claim Twitter didn’t screen the messages in the photo. They’ve found quite unsavory tweets in the mosaic.)
Regardless, Twitter users mentioned Steve Jobs at a rate of 6,049 tweets per second on Wednesday night, according to data released yesterday. That’s about 360,000 a minute, an impressive amount of noise.
Not nearly as impressive as pop star Beyonce’s surprise pregnancy announcement at the MTV Music Video Awards earlier this year. That still tops Twitter’s list, at 8,868 tweets per second.
Twitter did not, however, make a tweet mosaic of Beyonce.
That’s an honor that belongs exclusively to Steve Jobs.
Photo by Twitter