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Australian social media monitoring agency SR7 pulled off something of a PR coup after predicting that death of Steve Jobs was the biggest event in Twitter history based on the number of tweets per second.

The firm estimated that 10,000 tweets were being posted per second as news spread of the technology guru's death. The estimate was faithfully reported by the Sydney Morning Herald (and others), as news sites claimed that the event was the most tweeted.

The Herald wrote: 'The death of Steve Jobs has provoked the biggest online reaction of any event in recent history, with social media monitoring firm SR7 expecting official Twitter figures to come in at 10,000 tweets per second.'

A Forbes blog later corrected the estimate, citing statistics from a Twitter spokeswoman who noted that at its height there were 6,000 tweets being posted per second, nearly 3,000 fewer than when US singer Beyoncé announced her pregnancy last month. Twitter users were posting at a range of 8868 tweets per second when the singer revealed she was expecting.

Other commentators did note that the total number of tweets may break previous records as people continued to post at a rapid rate for a sustained period after the news broke.

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