Jackson’s Death May Be Black Mark for Twitter (NYT)

Jackson’s Death May Be Black Mark for Twitter
June 26, 2009, 7:19 am

The news of Michael Jackson’s untimely death rocked Twitter as fans of the pop music star sought the latest information and posted their reactions to the news.

Shortly after TMZ, a news entertainment site, published a report around 5 p.m. stating that Mr. Jackson had died after suffering a heart attack, thousands of messages expressing disbelief, grief and remembrances flooded the Twitter microblogging service, causing the site to load more slowly than usual and crash multiple times.

The spike in users apparently overloaded Twitter’s search engine, causing it to return results sporadically, if at all.

Twitter subsequently announced Thursday that said it had disabled the search field on users’ home pages entirely.

PaidContent suggested that the search engine meltdown did not bode well for Twitter’s ambitions to be a “real-time” search engine, which is viewed by many industry observers to be its most valuable feature.

Whether Twitter will be able to leverage its popularity to make money is the subject of much debate in the industry. During the elections in Iran, Twitter proved a useful source of information for news outlets, leading to suggestions that its value might be connected to its utility as a real-time reporting tool.

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http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/26/jacksons-death-may-be-black-mark-for-twitter/?

But Facebook was pretty slow too and the news sites were all but useless.

Then, hit the 'search' button on the bottom. Search the topic of interest and you can get news coming in fast.

I've virtually abandoned google for news. And i've totally "moth-balled" my RSS reader.

this doesn't seem unusual.

A few glitches are expected along the way. And Twitter definitely has those. I know...first hand. Seems Twitter has been dumping legitimate users (like myself) by the thousands into "spam jail" such that their tweets are no longer visible to anyone outside their group of followers. Should be a faily simple fix...one would think. Ugh...

MJ crashed their servers multiple times,
but their servers easily handled the Iran election, protests, and massacres.

but with Jacksons Death many wanted to post their thoughts, memories etc.

i don't use or even go to the website. i do read what others post from there on DU and elsewhere. but don't use it myself.

i think for things like Iran it can be useful but i never cared what it was mostly used for by most people which is share their every thought or what they are doing every moment.

i can understand people wanting to share their memories of Jackson but doesn't Twitter limit the characters people can use ? i would think some blog or other site would be better to it.

What if they had a big event and it was over-covered? What good is Twitting? The facts of the day were pretty cut and dried the moment Jacko's people called the ambulence, the media feeding frenzy was on and will deluge us for days to come.

As is the case with these type of stories, there are periods of time where there is nothing to report and the silence drives the media and Twitter crazy. It's lots of conjecture and bloviating to fill the void...but in due time the real story came forward and then it was rehash time...and rehash and rehash.

I found it interesting watching Facebook and to see how quickly people got the information...what they passed along and the reaction. Most were dubious of TMZ's quick claim and I was as well...as if they were wrong, they could walk it back and few would notice while if they were right, we won't hear the end of it and the horrid Harvey Levin.

Twitter's 15 minutes is not that far away as newer, more sophisticated handheld wireless toys will make that site the Napster of 2009.

If the overflow forced Twitter to shut down the search engine, that's a sign of how popular it is, not how incompetent.

:headbang:
rocktivity

:rofl:

After his death yesterday I got a chill thinking about what I saw on Twitter last weekend.
Someone was spamming the tweets with hperlinks trying to get people to click on their sales websites by using shit like "breaking news: (insert random celebrity name here) is DEAD.
One of the names they used: Michael Jackson.