Posted on February 4, 2009 - by Khaled

Twitter Should be Sorry! Or may be not?

Twitter Effect Vs Mash Effect: Experimenting how Twitter traffic can crash your server!
Twitter and it docile little blue bird is not that inoffensive! If you are not careful it could literally crash your server! How? By sending huge amounts of traffic to you! If you don’t believe me just ask the poor server hosting http://www.litmanlive.co.uk…
It all started when the rock star twitterer and blogger Pete Cashmore linked in one of his tweets to a blog post entitled “How to use Twitter to find your next job“. And a retweeting snow ball started causing the litmanlive server to collapse! Pete called it the “Mash Effect” whereas Pingdom dubbed it the “twitter effect” or more exactly the “dawn of the twitter effect“! And I agree it is the Twitter effect rather than the Mash effect (despite the huge popularity of Mashable)!

“The Twitter Effect” formula!
Believe it or not the “Twitter effect” can be mathematically calculated via a formula:

The Twitter Effect  = (Original tweet * followers) + (retweets * followers of retweeters) + (retweets of retweets * followers of those)! (etc.)

Thoughts and predictions:
I would just add  “potentially active” in front of each repetition of the word “Followers”. The  tweet effect will really vary according to the tweeting time and to the importance and the relevance of the topic during that period of time! Speaking of getting work in recession and firing times like these days is really and highly relevant in my opinion and that might explain why this very special tweet by Cashmore had this effect!
Twitter can be a source of great direct traffic and all of us are interested in building traffic to our web sites and blogs especially a traffic constituted by visitors that already know why are they checking this very specific web page. Twitter has been unceasingly offering an increasing source of traffic. And it is probably going to continue to do so. So prepare to witness the “Tsunami Twitter Effect” that I believe will reach new heights in the next years in comparison with other sources (i.e. Digg, stumble upon or FaceBook) as Twitter is more accessible and a lot easier to use by everyone than the other tools. Twitter is probably less famous than Digg or FaceBook but soon the great buzz/boom about it will happen and everyone and his dog will be using Twitter! Just look how many blog posts, media and news items are focusing on Twitter!
Twitter might even cause a drop in the use of RSS organizers such as Netvibes. It won’t probably replace them completely but it will make you want to visit them less! Netvibes even has a Twitter widget now!
Anyway I think it is important to start monitoring the traffic coming to you from twitter which could be quite challenging. I would suggest reading this article to help understand how you should proceed.

So what do you think? should Twitter be sorry for crushing servers? or may be not? Anyway it is time for you, Twitter, to get a clear business model!

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