Filed under: WWDC, Internet Tools
Will WWDC break Twitter?
In the Venn diagram of users, the intersection of "Mac" and "Twitter" appears to be quite large. Why this is, I'm not sure, but it's true that many Mac users rely on the short-message broadcasting service for their day-to-day lives.
There's some concern in both communities that the flood of new tweets about announcements at tomorrow's WWDC will break the back of the Twitter infrastructure. Their uptime has been mostly in the 90s this month, with some features still disabled for performance reasons.
Do you think it will hold up? What will do you if Twitter grinds itself into metal shavings?
A poll and results, plus more updates (!!) all after the jump.
2:30 p.m. update: MG Siegler, the author of the VentureBeat story says in an email that he spoke with Twitter HQ about the event. Twitter assured him "they have a plan in place to make sure [a problem] doesn't happen and also have something fun planned. Biz Stone (who I talked to) wouldn't elaborate on either."3:30 p.m. update: Commenter millenomi points us to Twitter's own blog post from just minutes ago about the preparations they're making. They're doing some hard-core server optimization, and in case that fails, they can turn Twitter services on and off quickly to shed load. Plus: one more thing. Could it be ... [REDACTED]?!
_thumbnail.jpg "Take a stroll down memory lane")
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Frank said 1:20PM on 6-08-2008
i was skeptical about the usefulness of twitter in the beginning, and stayed away as long as i could for a variety of reasons, but now that i am using it i find that i really like it. i hope it doesn't go away!
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Tony said 2:39PM on 6-08-2008
I've yet to find a use for it... sure you can put up one line descriptions about yourself, but why would anyone have any incentive to look at it? Facebook does that better.
Really for fast updates for something like this you need irc.
anthony said 6:25PM on 6-08-2008
I agree with Frank. I signed up pretty early on and didn't start using it a lot until about two months ago. It's hard being without it and the outages are bothersome to say the least. To Tony, and other's questioning the usability, for me it has a lot to do with keeping in touch with friends and people in my community - having Twitterberry installed on my Pearl and Twinkle on my iPhone is Paramount. The service is still young but I think it has potential to become the next new platform for communication (BBS, email, IRC, IM, SMS, Twitter).
I would recommend avoiding Twitter Monday and find other means of keeping up with the keynote.
Frank said 7:11PM on 6-08-2008
exactly, anthony -- i find it great for those little moments you want to tell people about but nobody's around, or those random funny thoughts that come to you during the day. i only tweet a couple times a day, but i try to once at day at least. i also think it would be very efficient way to get out short bits of critical info to friends and family very quickly. for instance, what made me start my twitter account is that my cat got very sick, and almost died, and this saved me having to tell everyone the same story about what had happened in the past X-number of hours, and what her status was at the time.
Brent said 1:22PM on 6-08-2008
"The server a-splode" I love it! :)
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Brad said 1:28PM on 6-08-2008
Of course. Apparently you've been reading my Plurks.
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Big John said 2:15PM on 6-08-2008
Sssh don't mention that site! I want it to survive tomorrow!
TD said 1:41PM on 6-08-2008
A Wednesday breaks Twitter, so of course WWDC will!
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Able-X said 1:43PM on 6-08-2008
Considering they still can't even get their own flash based site badges working again, I say server will a-splode. Theres NO way they'll be able to handle the traffic, as they can barely cope as it is.
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Big John said 2:15PM on 6-08-2008
Sites like TUAW, Engadget and others are painfully slow on keynote days (with good reason, not blaming the sites). I've come to rely on other services, like Twitter, to follow these kinds of events. I hope it keeps up tomorrow but other, lesser known microblogging services might survive the impact a bit better.
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Simon Arch said 2:24PM on 6-08-2008
Can anyone recommend a good Twitter feed to follow the goings-on tomorrow? I sure hope Twitter can keep up!
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paul said 2:29PM on 6-08-2008
One word: Plurk
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Todd Sieling said 2:33PM on 6-08-2008
Totally agree with TD. Twitter has been going through a bad patch for weeks now, so going down during and shortly after WWDC isn't really significant.
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Brandon said 2:47PM on 6-08-2008
I'm kinda scared... I really hope they backed some things up.
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wythrol said 2:48PM on 6-08-2008
A gnats fart in a wind tunnel is enough to break Twitter. WWDC is the equivalent of a jet engine down a drinking straw.
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millenomi said 3:16PM on 6-08-2008
Ahem: http://blog.twitter.com/2008/06/twitterapple.html -- straight from the li'l bird's mouth.
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Lee said 4:34PM on 6-08-2008
Twitter as a notification service has become awful of late and I'm another one joining the "of course it's going down" group. HOWEVER if it doesn't go down the recent changes it made to the API where you can only refresh 30 times and hour for certain posts and then the changes all the clients makers made ( Twitterific for one ) to comply means that almost real time updates from Twitter are now useless unless it's 2am in the States.
The issue with all the readers, bloggers and tweters is that we want to know what's going on at WWDC in (almost) real time, so delayed tweet sending while it helps not crash the service is useless to people using it for updates of this event.
Here's hoping someone with an N95 and Qix is at WWDC .
On a side note i have no idea why Apple by now haven't used their Quicktime Streaming Server product to show how it can handle real time broadcasts to many from these events live and even throw in some Apple product Ads at the same time ( You can have that one for free Steve ! ).
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kakapo said 12:09AM on 6-09-2008
Jobs will go "Boom" and Twitter will a-splode! Bloop!!!....
I like TWTR too... good way to keep w/ things and frnds.
Chrs
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Simon said 12:55AM on 6-09-2008
That is the coolest effin' illustration ever. I love it.
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sms021 said 11:09AM on 6-09-2008
I've been using Twitter for a while now but I'm surprised it's lasted this long. my money is on it crashing.
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