Teknovis

I read three articles on TechCrunch today regarding Internet traffic on election day of the US election.

• The top news websites are ranked in Hitwise Ranks Election Traffic To News Sites. Yahoo News was the most popular, although I think they are actually a news aggregator. It is also interesting to see that some news websites actually had a decrease in traffic!
• The top news websites also received a significant amount of foreign visitors, as described in News Sites Attract Record Audience on Election Night. It is estimated that at the peak time there were more than 8.5 million visitors per minute! This is a new world record according to the linked Net Usage Index for News article. This article also lists the previous 14 world records.
• The viral effect of the candidates’ videos is described in How To Make Your Video Go Viral: Become President. The official version of Obama’s victory speech on YouTube has already been watched over 2 million times, and I expect this figure to keep growing! Furthermore, many people have already uploaded their own recordings of this speech. (On a side note, I am not really convinced that this is a viral video!)

I do not expect that websites outside of the US experienced significant increases, because there is less interest in the US election, and the time differences made it a bit impractical!

Finally, Twitter also had an extremely busy night, as described in OMG, That Was A Big Day. It is a pity that this post does not give some more general statistics. For example, are any of these statistics new records?

I think that it is very impressive that all of the major websites that experienced heavy traffic were able to cope with it. I particularly like Twitter’s approach:

Our technical approach over the last several months has been to find the weakest point of the system, fix it so it’s no longer the weakest, move to the next weakest point, and so on.

I also notice that the new president is a Twitter user! It will be great if he can continue to find time to maintain his online presence!

Tags: TechCrunch, Twitter, US Election 2008, Viral, Yahoo, YouTube

I have stayed up very late to watch the US election, and it is now clear who the winner is! However, I do not want to get into politics in this blog!

From a technology point-of-view, I am amazed how much attention the mainstream media has given to the online election campaigns. In particular, I am sure that every viewer must now be aware of Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube. Also, the winner thanked his supporters by email before making his first public appearance!

It will be very interesting to see some statistics from the main news web sites over the next few days regarding how busy their web servers were. I would expect some records!

Tags: Email, Facebook, MySpace, US Election 2008, YouTube

RTE are reporting that Bank of Ireland has lost a memory stick that contains personal details of almost 900 customers. The full article is Bank of Ireland customer details lost.

This is just the latest incident of Bank of Ireland losing customer details! However, in this case the bank is claiming that the storage of customer details without encryption on a memory stick is a breach of its policies and procedures.

Perhaps Bank of Ireland needs to examine why employees are able to copy sensitive customer details to any memory sticks!

Tags: Bank of Ireland, Encryption, Memory Stick, RTE

ComScore released a press release today covering the UK Web Rankings for September 2008. Several news sites are commenting on the fact that Facebook has overtaken the BBC to occupy the fifth spot. Indeed, this was the most significant change in the list. I guess that this is not surprising, given the universal appeal that Facebook currently has!

I find this especially interesting, because I read an article on TechCrunch over the weekend claiming that Facebook may be trying to raise more capital in order to cover their soaring costs. To put this in context, Facebook have raised almost $500 million in 2007 and 2008 already. So what are they doing with all of this cash? Some of the more interesting costs cited are:

• $2 million per week for additional storage
• $1 million per month on electricity
• $500,000 per month on bandwidth
• $10 million per month on payroll

So where are Facebook trying to raise this extra capital from in this time of economic cautiousness? Dubai!

It will be very interesting to see if they succeed in raising more capital, and at what price! I am certainly not dying to get a piece of that action!

Tags: BBC, ComScore, Dubai, Facebook, TechCrunch