Internet braces for royal wedding
As the bride climbs into her dress, the groom adjusts his cufflinks, the 1,900 invited guests arrive, and chefs make final preparations for the festivities to follow the ceremony, popular websites like YouTube, Flickr, Facebook and Twitter will be tuning their systems for a surge of wedding watchers.
In less than 24 hours, Prince William will marry Kate Middleton at Westminster Abbey in London, England. It's the first British royal wedding in the age of the modern internet, and the monarchy promises to make it an internet-friendly event. Tomorrow's celebration will be streamed live via YouTube, and the official royal-wedding website will post status updates to Twitter and Facebook; so will about 400 million of the royal family's biggest fans, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal.
The anticipated increase in online traffic for tomorrow's royal wedding could bring the internet to a frustratingly slow crawl and may topple some of the web's premier destinations. Matt Graves, a spokesman for Twitter.com, said his site is ready for the deluge of wow-look-at-that-dress tweets that will inevitably arrive as Kate walks down the aisle.
As seen above, Twitter posted a photo of its co-founder, Biz Stone, mounting a single Xserve labelled "Wills & Kate" in preparation for the big event. The picture prompted the not-actually-official TwitterGlobalPR account to snipe, "Rumours of Twitter needing extra servers for the Royal Wedding are greatly exaggerated. We only need one." Of course, the photo is intended as a joke -- everyone knows Twitter's infrastructure runs on the Mac mini.
Historically, major news and events have caused trouble for popular websites. Twitter, for example, displayed a boatload of fail whales after Michael Jackson died in 2009 and during the World Cup and Wimbledon in 2010. The simultaneous sporting tournaments generated the highest traffic in the internet's history when over 10 million links were clicked per minute, according to Akamai.
Will the internet survive Prince William and Kate Middleton's big day? We'll all find out at 11:00 am London time on Friday, April 29.
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As the bride climbs into her dress, the groom adjusts his cufflinks, the 1,900 invited guests arrive, and chefs make final...
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This isn't simply about the future king of England getting married -- he also happens to be the first born child of that fairy-tale princess, Diana.
Kate Middleton isn't as glamorous as Princess Di was, so I reckon I'll just stay in bed a little longer tomorrow, even though, as a Brit, I'm supposed to swear allegiance to the Queen, whose husband is always walking around with both feet in his mouth, and a son who gave up a beautiful woman for a wrinkled wretch. I won't mention the sister, Margaret as it's not good to talk ill of dead people or the rest of the family who are bigger scroungers than every person on welfare.
Hail to the king, baby!
April 28 2011 at 7:23 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyI'll be watching a stream of the Shuttle launch instead.
April 28 2011 at 6:05 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyThe US population seems to love the British Royals, especially their weddings. But what about Canada? Queen Elizabeth is on their money, for some bizarre reason, so they must be even more Royal-crazy. Right?
April 28 2011 at 4:47 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyYeah, I find it quite odd that Americans, who violently rebelled to cut their ties with the British Empire, are so into the goings on of British Royalty.
I'm Canadian, and I couldn't care less. But I'm probably not representative of the rest of the population.
Not Americans, but the American Media.
April 28 2011 at 5:34 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyDoes Twitter really run off of the Mac Mini? Or was this sarcasm that flew right over my head?
April 28 2011 at 4:05 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyDoes Twitter really run off of Mac Mini servers? Or was that sarcasm that flew over my head?
April 28 2011 at 4:04 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyThis wedding ranks about a 1.0 on my give-a-crap-o-meter. The fact that it might slow down my access to porn? Very upsetting.
April 28 2011 at 3:07 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyBwahaha! Nice.
April 28 2011 at 3:15 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyStern's coverage tomorrow sounds promising!
April 28 2011 at 3:43 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyCan't wait for this wedding to be over. Yesterday, over 100 tornados criss-crossed the SouthEast United States with communities destroyed and over 200 dead. However here in the United States, the wedding still got more air time than this natural disaster.
I'll be sleeping though it myself. Won't be able to turn on the news tomorrow though because this is all they will cover.
I agree with you that the tornados should've been given much more attention but the wedding is news. I don't mind seeing some bright spot in the news when it generally is depressing with evil dictators, a struggling economy and birth certificates.
They seem like genuinely nice people and I wish them well.
As far as celebrities go, I am sure they are nice people. Just don't know them and they aren't my royal family.
April 28 2011 at 3:30 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyDeals of the Day
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