3:27 p.m. | Updated Added new figures from Twitter on the volume of tweets circulating through the site on Sunday as well as additional figures from Instagram.
An Instagram user captured the president’s speech.When President Obama delivered the news of Osama bin Laden’s death late Sunday night, many of those watching were doing more than watching.
For example, users of Instagram, a popular photo-sharing application for the iPhone, flooded the service with photos of Mr. Obama speaking, snapped from television and laptop screens — as if to say, “We are all a part of this.”
Word that the president would be making a statement prompted millions to turn on their televisions, but plenty of people also grabbed their smartphones, cracked open their laptops and powered on their iPads.
Twitter was abuzz with speculation about what the president might say. Some people joked that he might reveal news of alien contact or a giant meteor hurtling towards Earth. Others bemoaned the interruption of their favorite television shows. Mostly, they waited, anxiously.
During the speech, a deluge of stunned responses hit Facebook, with many expressing disbelief, surprise and approval.
Sean Garrett, the head of communications at Twitter, said there were 5,106 messages a second flowing through the site in response to the news.
The numbers were higher than those during the World Cup and the Super Bowl, which at its peak, generated 4,062 Tweets a second. Mr. Garrett said the highest volume of messages ever recorded on Twitter was during New Year’s Eve in Japan, when the service logged 6,000 a second at midnight.
Inevitably there were instant faux feeds on Twitter with satirical commentary about Bin Laden’s death, including Ghost Osama and Osama in Hell.
On Tumblr, the blogging service, the president’s speech became fodder for quick animation loops, and there were doctored images of Mr. Obama riding a unicorn, with rainbows shooting out of his hands.
Instagram users were soon posting photos of American flags. Some joined the crowds outside the White House and at ground zero in Manhattan. “You can basically follow what’s happening from multiple perspectives,” said Kevin Systrom, chief executive of Instagram.
Overall, the company saw 35 percent jump in the number of uploads typical of a late Sunday evening. In addition, some photographs that were posted to Twitter from Instagram were circlulated on Twitter upwards of 1,000 times, Mr. Systrom said.
Path, another popular photo-sharing application for phones, said that more than 20 percent of the items posted to the service Sunday night were related to the Bin Laden news. Path lets users add keywords to their postings to categorize and filter them. Dave Morin, one of the founders of the company, said that “tv,” “making,” “history,” and “surreal” were among the most popular tags used.
Sysomos, a social media monitoring company, said that within a few hours of Mr. Obama’s speech on Sunday evening, it recorded more than 2 million mentions of bin Laden’s death. That figure continued to swell overnight, said Nilesh Bansal, co-founder and chief technologist officer of the company, topping 3 million by early Monday.
“There were hundreds of tweets posted every second and a much larger number of people consuming that information,” he said. “Social media is becoming the main medium for how this information is spreading. Of course, people are still watching television, reading the news, but social media is becoming a main medium.”
Mr. Bansal said the company also noticed that messages on Twitter were being posted from a number of different countries, all over the map.
“It was a global phenomenon,” he said. “Everyone was talking about it all over the world, not just the U.S. and Pakistan.”