Teknovis

Although I still have not found time to start using Twitter, it still fascinates me! It amazes me that there is so much hype around it, and yet it is based on a really simple idea that does not really have any significant technology behind it.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about Twitter is the amount of money that the company has raised, especially since Twitter does not seem to have a business model that involves revenue! It reminds me of the dot-com days when investors concerned themselves with numbers of visitors rather than revenues ;)

However, this might change very soon! According to an article that I read today, Twitter is considering charging companies who use it. However, the exact details of the charging model are not clear yet. For more details about this see Twitter To Start Charging Companies For Having An Account?.

Tags: Twitter

This week Google launched a new version of Google Maps for Mobile that enables users to share their location information with their friends. So basically it realises a FriendFinder LBS! This is something that I worked on before, but neither the technology nor the market were ready at that time :(

The new software is known as Latitude, and there are both desktop and mobile versions. The privacy features seem fairly basic, so I am sure that it is only a matter of time until there is some controversial security breach!

I will try and install and review Latitude here soon! In the mean time, you can read more details about it in Google will tell your mates where you are, and you can download it from Introducing Google Latitude.

However, Latitude has been dismissed by Irish company Locle for not being social enough! Locle has an application that enables users to locate their friends. However, its application is intended to be significantly more social because it will integrate seamlessly with both Facebook and Twitter. For more details about this see Competitor to Google Latitude pitches to Facebook and Twitter.

Tags: Facebook, Google, Locle, Twitter

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