That Michael Jackson effect
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Twitter, Blog, Google, Internet on
Whatever your opinion of the man and his music, there can be little doubting the impact that the death of Michael Jackson has had on the Internet. I was working late when I spotted the first message floating past on Twitter which said that Jackson had suffered a fatal heart attack. Of course, Twitter is not immune to the usual run of hoaxes and fakes, so I did not take much notice. At least not until the next message popped up on-screen within a few minutes, and pretty soon the unconfirmed news of the death of the King of Pop was pretty much dominating my Tweet stream. So it was I Googled ‘Michael Jackson’ only to warned that my query “looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application.”
It would appear that Google mistakenly thought it was under attack, when in fact all that was happening was a huge spike in the need for information from millions of people around the world at the same time. You know, the kind of thing that Google was pretty much invented for, that the Internet is meant to do so well. Google called it a “meteoric rise in related searches” and “one of the largest mobile search spikes we’ve ever seen.” In fact it admits that the Michael Jackson search spike was “so big that Google News initially mistook it for an automated attack” and took those malware warning precautions.
Twitter wasn’t faring much better, with more than 60,000 Michael Jackson tweets posted in 60 minutes and causing a slowdown in service accessibility. I’ve heard tales of protestors in Iran being unable to get their Twitter updates which have served them so well, for example. Indeed, I have posed the question before that celebrities could be killing Twitter and on this occasion a celebrity managed to crash the site for a while.
I would have hoped, given just how important the Internet has become around the world, that such a news spike would be absorbed much better than this. If Google, Twitter and others struggled to stay working properly because of this, just what would happen if World War Three was declared? The kind of event for which we would, as a nation, as a planet, turn to the Internet for information and advice. So much for the network that could survive a nuclear attack, it couldn’t even cope with the death of a controversial pop star.
Rated: 80% (3 votes)
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Comment by - June 28, 2009 on 11:44 pm
Imagine you own a huge bar-like Mickey Gilley’s, and you have around 500 people on a typical Saturday night. Now imagine if one Saturday night 5,000 people showed up with no warning, I daresay you would run out of beer real fast.
I commend any social media platform that can remain up and running during an onslaught such as this. Servers aren’t cheap. Redundant data pipes to the Internet backbone aren’t cheap either.
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[…] IT PRO: Blogs: Davey Winder: That Michael Jackson effect www.itpro.co.uk/blogs/daveyw/2009/06/28/that-michael-jackson-effect – view page – cached , Whatever your opinion of the man and his music, there can be little doubting the impact that the death of Michael Jackson has had on the Internet. I was working — From the page […]
Comment by - October 9, 2009 on 8:20 am
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Comment by - October 16, 2009 on 7:42 am
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Comment by - November 4, 2009 on 7:36 am
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