Techization

Tragic news broke Thursday afternoon as Michael Jackson was pronounced dead at UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles.  Jackson left many fans heart broken across the globe as he took a great deal of talent and mystery to the grave.  He almost took something else with him as well, the Internet.

Twitter had to temporarily shut down their search results, saved searches and trending topics to mitigate a full-blown site failure.  This isn’t uncommon for the micro-blogging site.  Twitter has been known to be very unstable during breaking news like the Hudson River plane crash and the Iranian conflict.  “We saw over twice the normal tweets per second the moment the story broke as people shared their grief and memories,” Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told The Associated Press via e-mail.

AT&T said they set a new record for most text messages being sent over their network.  In the minutes following Jackson’s death AT&T subscribers were sending 4,000,000 text messages per minute at its peak, they also said call volume was up 10% during that same time.  AT&T went on to say that the spike in volume from Jackson’s death was even greater than during the September 11th terrorist attacks in New York City.  This is an unfair comparison by AT&T because their customer base significantly increased thanks to the Apple iPhone in the past three years and mergers.  In 2001 AT&T wireless had about 20 million subscribers, in the first quarter of 2009 they had just under 80 million.

Internet giant Google was also crippled by the breaking news.  The security software that protects Google from hackers thought it was under attack with so many queries coming in.   Those on Google News had to enter a ‘CAPTCHA’ code to prove they were real users and not bot.  Google also began displaying ‘malware’ alerts for users trying to search for breaking news on Jackson.  Search queries spiked around 2pm Pacific time, skyrocketed by 3pm, and finally leveled off by 8pm. The majority of Thursday’s hot trends related to Jackson’s death, Google said.  Google provided this chart showing queries about Michael Jackson on Thursday.

Facebook unsurprisingly dominated the social media spread of Michael Jackson’s death with its 300+ million user base.  The saturation of networks is best shown on this chart. (Look at that spike for Facebook!!!!)

Yahoo.com had a record setting day as well.  Yahoo News had 16.4 million unique visitors, breaking the 15.1 million record set on Election Day 2008.

This event will likely continue to be studied for months to come.  I’m waiting to see information released on the stress placed on Google’s server farms and Internet hubs worldwide that funnel traffic in places like Chicago, New York City, Atlanta and Dallas.   Sure trend analysis like the graph’s above are nice, but I would like to see some technical break down of the event.

Yahoo announced it will close its web hosting service called GeoCities later in 2009.  GeoCities brings back many memories for me.  Pounding the WebTV wireless keyboard into the wee hours of the morning building my two-column web pages complete with midi files and flying text.  This service began in 1994 when David Bohnett and John Rezner created ‘Beverly Hills Internet’.  The idea was you would build a website within a non-fictional city ‘network’ like Los Angeles or New York.  The idea was later scrapped though some sites still exist with that architecture.  Yahoo bought GeoCities for more than 3 billion dollars in 1999 shortly after the company wen’t public on the stock market.  During its peak in the late 90′s, Geocities was the 5th most trafficked site on the world wide web.  That is comparable to Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia today.

GeoCities let anyone have a presence on the web free of charge and voice their opinions, much like Blogspot and WordPress do today.  Many non-profit organizations and personal individuals used GeoCities as their host because of the ease of use and cost.  Remember, this was back when everyone thought it was cool to have a ‘website’ with pictures of their dog and what they enjoy for hobbies.  GeoCities served their constituents very well for more than a decade.

R.I.P.  GeoCities —  2009 — This one is for you… ABBA – Dancing Queen

What really makes me feel old?  The trending topic on Twitter is ‘What Was GeoCities’.