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Twitter is Down due to heavy activity

April 8, 2009 · Leave a Comment

I tried to login to twitter a while ago and it failed to load!

Guess what the error was? It was unavailable due to the extra ordinary load on the servers. I believe that twitter is being bombarded heavily by the Moldovians at the moment who are trying to keep their fellows updated through internet. Keep in mind that there are severe protests going on in the country of Moldova against their government and all the media including TV channels are state controlled.

That looks like the most busiest day for Twitter. Servers going down due to traffic is not a good thing but it is also a success parameter for a web site. Tomorrow they will be able to handle heaps more (they should have anticipated it though).

Read about the contribution of Twitter in Moldova protests:
http://hashfactor.wordpress.com/2009/04/08/a-twitter-revolution-in-moldova/

Technorati Tags: Twitter,servers down,activity,heavy,busy,moldova,protests,media

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Categories: LifeFactor
Tagged: activity, busy, heavy, media, Moldova, protests, servers down, Twitter

A twitter revolution in Moldova

April 8, 2009 · 1 Comment

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/07/student-protests-are-turning-into-a-twitter-revolution-in-moldova/

Students in Moldova are using Twitter as a tool to mobilize opposition against a communist victory in Moldovian elections. According to reports, close to 10,000 protesters gathered at Moldova’s parliament in Chisinau, Moldova’s capital and were able to eventually break through police lines to storm into the building. From looking at the tweets on the subject, it appears that the demonstration turned into a violent coup attempt.

In the last 48 hours, students from Moldova have been tweeting, trying to rally others into demonstrating against the communists. If you look under the search terms “pman” (stands for Piata Marii Adunari Nationale, a square in Chisinau) or “Chisinau,” you can see the tweets about the demonstration coming in a rapid pace. There are also videos on YouTube of the protest. There have been reports that there is limited cellphone reception in the square (thought to have been turned off by authorities). So protesters are using Twitter to give live updates via GPRS networks on their mobile devices.

Twitter has long-been been a popular platform for breaking news, but this adds a new twist to the powerful capabilities of the micro-blogging service. The protests no doubt would have happened anyway and it is not clear how may of the actual protesters in Moldova are on Twitter. But it seems to be helping both as a coordinating tool and as a way to disseminate information about the events that are unfolding to the rest of the world.

Here are a few sample tweets:

“Chisinau - live feed from Radio Vocea Basarabiei is intrerrupted. will retransmit later. where are the official authorities?”
“RT @Moscovici: Protesters report police attacks protesters. Severe fights between police and protesters now in Chisinau, Moldova. #pman”
“The #twitter revolution – Twitter as the organizing tool for protests in Chisinau http://is.gd/rhwJ”

Technorati Tags: Twitter,Moldova,revolution,students protest,chisinau

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Categories: LifeFactor
Tagged: chisinau, Moldova, revolution, students protest, Twitter

Google in late stages to buy Twitter

April 3, 2009 · Leave a Comment

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/02/sources-google-in-late-stage-talks-to-buy-twitter/

Here’s a heck of a rumor that we’ve sourced from two separate people close to the negotiations: Google is in late stage negotiations to acquire Twitter. We don’t know the price but can assume its well, well north of the $250 million valuation that they saw in their recent funding.

Twitter turned down an offer to be bought by Facebook just a few months ago for half a billion dollars, although that was based partially on overvalued Facebook stock. Google would be paying in cash and/or publicly valued stock, which is equivalent to cash. So whatever the final acquisition value might be, it can’t be compared apples-to-apples with the Facebook deal.

Why would Google want Twitter? We’ve been arguing for some time that Twitter’s real value is in search. It holds the keys to the best real time database and search engine on the Internet, and Google doesn’t even have a horse in the game. In a post last month called It’s Time To Start Thinking Of Twitter As A Search Engine, I wrote:

More and more people are starting to use Twitter to talk about brands in real time as they interact with them. And those brands want to know all about it, whether to respond individually (The W Hotel pestered me until I told them to just leave me alone), or simply gather the information to see what they’re doing right and what they’re doing wrong.

And all of it is discoverable at search.twitter.com, the search engine that Twitter acquired last summer.

People searching for news. Brands searching for feedback. That’s valuable stuff.

Twitter knows it, too. They’re going to build their business model on it. Forget small time payments from users for pro accounts and other features, all they have to do is keep growing the base and gather more and more of those emotional grunts. In aggregate it’s extremely valuable. And as Google has shown, search is vastly monetizable – somewhere around 40% of all online advertising revenue goes to ads on search listings today.

If this is accurate, it’s a brilliant deal for Google – the value of Twitter is only going to go up over time. And it will be Twitter founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone’s second sale to Goolge – they sold Blogger to them just five years ago. But there’s one big question – where’s Microsoft in all this? Letting Twitter go to Google only hurts them, badly, in the long term search game. This is an asset they need to be competing for aggressively.

Of course, it’ll be sad to see Twitter become just another subsidiary of Google, if this happens. I would have liked to have seen the company spread its wings a little longer to see what it could do.

Updated: Yet another source says the acquisition discussions are still fairly early stage, and the two companies are also considering working together on a Google real time search engine.