Ilya Zhitomirskiy, left, and Diaspora co-founder Daniel Grippi

Public memorial services for Zhitomirskiy are planned for this Friday in San Francisco and Sunday in Philadelphia, the company said in an emailed statement.

Sources said the cause of death was suicide, and the San Francisco Police Department indicated as much, but the company declined to comment.

Here’s the statement:

We’re incredibly sad to say that our close friend and co-founder Ilya Zhitomirskiy has passed away.

Ilya was a great friend and a brilliant person, a visionary whose work for a better future online brought hope to many people.

Our hearts, thoughts, and prayers are with Ilya’s family as they cope with this incredibly painful loss.

Public memorial services for Ilya are tentatively planned for this Friday November 18th in San Francisco and Sunday in Philadelphia. In life, Ilya brought people together. In death, he would have wanted the same thing.

We’ll post further details soon when final arrangements are made.

We’ll all miss Ilya, more than we can say.

Word of Zhitomirskiy’s death emerged on Sunday.

Diaspora is on the verge of launching publicly a year and a half after Zhitomirskiy and his fellow New York University student co-founders were inundated with $200,000 worth of Kickstarter donations, based on excitement about their concept of a privacy-conscious alternative to Facebook. They had been living and working in San Francisco, with Zhitomirskiy focused on Diaspora’s infrastructure and encryption.

Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook, who took the CEO reins from Mr. Jobs as his health worsened in August, spoke at the memorial along with board member Bill Campbell, Mr. Jobs’s longtime friend and former colleague who is chairman of Intuit Inc., according to a person familiar with the matter.

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The event will be held at Stanford University’s campus Sunday evening, according to the invitation. It follows a small private funeral held for the Apple co-founder and chief executive last week.

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“Jerry joined Apple’s Board in 1997 when most doubted the company’s future. He has been a pillar of financial and business expertise and insight on our Board for over a dozen years,” CEO Steve Jobs said in a statement. “It’s been a privilege to know and work with Jerry, and I’m going to miss him a lot.”

Apple has posted a full-page memorial to York on the front page of Apple.com.

So says video views tracker TubeMogul, which illustrates its argument via a nifty interactive chart at the bottom of this post.

If you don’t like charts, here are some words: Unauthorized clips of Jackson’s July 7 funeral/memorial generated 16.6 million views on Google’s (GOOG) YouTube within 48 hours. But copies of newly unearthed footage from 1984, which shows Jackson’s hair going up in flames as he filmed a Pepsi commercial, are barely making a ripple, comparatively. Tubemogul says the clip generated fewer than 800,000 views in a 24-hour stretch.

Important distinction here: Tubemogul is tracking video views only. Anecdotally, there’s plenty of evidence that people are still interested in reading about Jackson online, especially as more and more lurid stories get out. But the YouTube audience, it seems, has moved on.

I feel a little funny about linking to or embedding the hair-fire clip. It has a sort of snuff-film quality to it, especially with the ghoulish music and commentary layered on by US Weekly, which says it has “exclusive” access to the video. But it’s easy enough to find if you want to gawk.

Here’s a more pleasant one:

Depending on your perspective, this is either interesting news or heartening news: Michael Jackson’s funeral and memorial were indeed a giant Internet event. But they don’t seem to have been as big as Michael Jackson’s death, and they weren’t as big as Barack Obama’s inauguration.

So let’s call them the third-biggest Web event of the year. To date.

That sounds more like what I was thinking this morning: Everyone had to watch Obama’s inauguration or read about Jackson’s death, but not everyone felt compelled to see his burial or memorial.

It also explains why the Akamai people were so uncomfortable with my earlier reading of their traffic stats this afternoon, when I concluded that the events were responsible for the content delivery service recording more visitors per minute than any other time in the last year. Though I’d still love it if someone could explain why that did happen. (Jennifer? Anyone?)

Statistics are tumbling in from different sites and services (if you’d like to share yours with me, I’m all  ears).

Here’s what I’ve got for now:

• Akamai (AKAM) says it delivered 2,185,000 “live and on-demand streams” today. If I’m comparing apples to apples here (Jennifer?), that’s much fewer than the seven million simultaneous streams the content delivery network delivered during Obama’s inauguration. Akamai also compares the number of visitors on its “Net Usage Index for News” and says that number peaked at 3,924,370–that’s nearly double average traffic of 2,000,000, but fewer than the 4,247,971 visitors who were looking for Jackson info when he died on June 25.
• Facebook, which integrated its service with live video feeds from CNN, E! ABC and MTV (why wasn’t Twitter doing this?), says that one million users posted 800,000 status updates during the event, with the overwhelming majority coming through CNN. There were 1.8 million updates with the word “Obama” in them during the inauguration.
• CNN says it served up 781,000 concurrent live streams during the event; during the Inauguration it served up 1.3 million. It served a total of 4.4 million streams during the event, and 10.4 million for the day.
• MSNBC claims three million live streams–which are different from concurrent streams–and says that is its second-highest total, after…well you can guess. More if they roll in.

Nope.

Check out these snapshots of Akamai’s live traffic meters, which I took shortly after 1 pm EDT. They indicate that the Web infrastructure company’s clients are serving up more than 109 million customers per minute–more than they have at any other period this year, including Barack Obama’s inauguration.

Akamai (AKAM) doesn’t represent all of the Web, but since it’s by far the biggest content delivery network service, it’s a pretty darn good proxy. The previous record appears to have been 90.6 million, set last month during the Iranian elections (click to enlarge):

UPDATE: The Akamai folks want me to note that this chart measures overall Web traffic, not just traffic to news sites, etc. Which means that there could be other factors pushing up traffic today — large software downloads, etc. And, for that matter, if you look at Akamai’s peak traffic days over the last year, you’ll note that they’ve increased nearly every month. So while we can say that Akamai’s was serving more Internet traffic at 1pm eastern time than it has at anytime in the last year, we can’t draw a straight line between that fact and the fact that Jackson event was happening at the same time. But I’m going to go ahead and draw a dotted line.

UPDATE 2: Now I see why the Akamai folks were so cautious. New stats indicate that the event was big on the Web, but not as big as the Obama inauguration.

Meanwhile, while I didn’t actually go ahead and write this, my hunch was that any Web traffic we did see today might come from countries outside the U.S. that either didn’t get a TV feed or that cared about Jackson much more than Americans did.

But Akamai’s visualization of traffic to news sites world-wide says I would have been wrong about that, too: Almost all of the traffic is being served up by American news sites, and traffic to sites around the world is down for this time of day.

But here’s the thing I still don’t get: All of this has been happening when there has been nothing to see. Here’s a representative screen grab of ABC’s live feed, which I took around 1:10 pm Eastern Time.

OK. Have at it. I’ll be back later in day with whatever other traffic tidbits I can round up.

One of the most interesting wrinkles on the Web over the last several years has been the near instant ability to create tribute videos for all sorts of reasons, most of which are an amalgam of pictures or snippets of videos that are set to music.

That’s been especially true in the cases of those who have died and especially with celebrities.

The death of Heath Ledger, of course, has been no exception. There are currently about 4,500 videos related to the actor that have been posted on YouTube, for example, over the last week alone. Some of the tributes have already garnered hundreds of thousands of views.

Here are two of the top videos, along with a music video Ledger directed himself for a Ben Harper song called “Morning Yearning,” at the bottom: