While Steve Jobs’ resignation yesterday had investors anxiously watching how $AAPL fared in trading, we at Gnip were having fun watching a different ticker- the realtime Twitter feed.

As you can see from the graph below (these represent the number of “Steve Jobs” mentions per minute*), Twitter showed an incredible spike almost immediately. Apple-specific activity peaked 11 minutes after the news broke, showing how quickly the word spread. Honors for first tweet go to @AronPinson, who must have some blazing fast typing skills.

Once again, it’s incredible to see how social media is quickly becoming a trusted means of accessing and delivering realtime information.

*For more details on how we conducted this search across the millions of real-time tweets we have access to, contact us!