Leaders in the , as well as fans and average people, took to Wednesday night and Thursday to spread the word about Jobs and to share memories and tributes to the man behind the iMac, iPod, and .

Around 8 p.m. EDT Wednesday, shortly after news of was made public, was handling 6,049 tweets per second, according to Twitter spokeswoman Rachael Horwitz.

"I'm surprised at the number of tweets it got, but I guess I shouldn't be," said Zeus Kerravala, principal analyst with ZK Research. "Social networks are increasingly the de facto place for people to go to when they want to share information. Twitter is perfect for this type of thing."

While Wednesday night didn't set a record for Twitter traffic, it was one of the site's highest number of tweets per second ever recorded.

Horwitz noted that early last May, the set a record at that time with a peak of 5,106 tweets per second.