Social media erupt in outpouring of grief

Moumita Bakshi Chatterjee Updated - October 06, 2011 at 09:53 PM.

The social media erupted in an unprecedented outpouring of grief as technology bigwigs, corporate honchos and Apple fans from across the world mourned the death of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.

The news of Jobs' death triggered a record-breaking outpour on the internet – unconfirmed reports suggest it may have generated 10,000 tweets per second, the Web traffic surging each passing minute.

“Steve, thank you for being a mentor and a friend. Thanks for showing that what you build can change the world. I will miss you,” Facebook Founder and CEO Mr Mark Zuckerberg said on his `wall'. The post got an overwhelming response – nearly 300,000 ‘likes' at the last count.

Search giant Google too paid homage to late Apple founder on its homepage – right under the search box, the company wrote ‘Steve Jobs, 1955 – 2011'.

Social media sites were flooded by posts on Jobs and, in India too, four of the top ten trending topics on Twitter were: #RIPStevejobs, #iSad, #ThankYouSteve and `Stay Hungry' (part of Job's emotional speech at Stanford in 2005).

“For me #Stevejobs was an idea and not just a person that will live on and on and on,” tweeted HCL Technologies' Vice-Chairman and CEO, Mr Vineet Nayar, adding “#Stevejobs is no more but his ideas that ignited many minds will never die.”

Mahindra Group Vice-Chairman and Managing Director Mr Anand Mahindra's tweet read: “It's hard to wake up to a world without Steve Jobs”.

Yet another tweet by Mr Vijay Mallya, Chairman of UB Group said, “In the passing of Steve Jobs the world has lost one of the greatest innovators of this century. I know Apple will always uphold his spirit.”

> moumita@thehindu.co.in

Published on October 6, 2011 16:23