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Twitter Says it's Ready for Election Day
Posted 11/03/2008 at 5:00:44am | by Michelle Delio

twitterBiz Stone is not afraid.

On the contrary, the co-founder of Twitter is not even a tiny bit nervous that his beloved micro-blogging service might collapse this Tuesday under an anticipated crush of incessantly tweating users.

 


“We're very much looking forward to Tuesday,” said Biz. “We'll be working late at Twitter just to make sure everything goes smoothly but we've decided to make it an election party -- we're inviting friends and family to watch the election unfold from our headquarters in San Francisco.”

Twitter has morphed from a toy to a serious communications tool over the past year, and will face a pretty big test this Tuesday when people will put it to use as a weapon against voter disenfranchisement and trendy TV bling for media coverage of the election.

Chirpy citizens can use Twitter Vote Report to share information and resolve problems at the polls across the U.S. Volunteers at Twitter Vote Report will plot problems on a Google map, enabling people in the same general vicinity to offer on the spot to people who are having issues to cast their votes.

Curent TV, a cable channel, co-founded by former Vice President Al Gore, will feature a "multimedia dashboard" displaying live messages from Twitter during the evening of November 4. Twitters own election site is already displaying all political tweets on one handy scrolling feed.

Stone says that Twitter has previously coped well with live events such as earthquakes and music festivals -- The American Red Cross uses Twitter to communicate with rescue workers and locals during disasters. He expects the service will be fine and dandy on Tuesday even though usage numbers have been rapidly spiking throughout the election’s end game.

“For example, Friday is typically a slower day on Twitter but not the Friday of the first presidential debate,” says Stone. That Friday updates jumped 18.5% from previous Friday, Updates during the debate increased 160% compared to same time last week, Signups on Friday were up 23%. Signups during the debate itself were up 135% compared to same time last week.”

fail whale

Service outages plagued Twitter in 2008 (leading users to dub downtime the "fail whale" in response to the cutesy image of a whale that’s displayed when Twitter is down and out). But Twitter has been pretty solid since August, according to stats provided by site and server tracking firm Pingdom’s blog. Stone credits backend adjustments and optimization for the improved uptime.

“Our approach has been to find the weakest point, fix it so it's no longer the weakest point, and then move to the next weakest point and continue on in that fashion,” said Stone. “Reliability and performance have steadily improved at Twitter. We anticipate record levels of activity during the election process but we don't anticipate performance problems.”

Twitter had a bit of a test run in October, during the Canadian elections. Despite a countrywide media blackout so that people in Western Canada wouldn’t be influenced by results from elsewhere in the country, people on Twitter, including reporters who just couldn’t resist the temptation, were sharing results with the entire country hours before the polls closed out west.

 

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