In other news today, Michael Jackson is reported as dying at age 50. It’s very sad, but neither his death nor his ownership of the Beatles’ music is the topic of this post (although hopefully with his death, the latter will be transferred to somebody who plays well with Apple, Inc.).
Michael Jackson: Trending
After TMZ reported his death, Twitter immediately became abuzz. I (of course) tweeted after becoming aware. Apparently millions of others did too as his name (and the Micheal spelling as well) appeared on Trending Topics. I clicked on his name and five seconds later there were 8000+ tweets waiting for me to read.
Soon after Twitter complete failed. See my post Twitter Stumbles for more thoughts on the happy Twitter whale.
It’s a sign of our time that when celebrity news happens, Twitter fails. When major earthquakes or political elections occur, Twitter can handle the load just fine. Go figure.
Either that means we (as a society) need to worry less about celebrity gossip and more about politics, or Twitter needs to update their systems to handle celebrity gossip.
Of course the irony of both a celebrity and Twitter dying (even if one only for a few moments) at the same time does not escape me. Farrah Fawcett also died today. It’s a bad day to be a celebrity–or Twitter. Does the parallel mean Twitter, too, is destined to die the death of a celebrity? It has its ups and downs, is constantly in the public eye, and in major need of some good PR.
Ah parallels. Fun for all, indeed.
haha how does a busy engineer have time to blog?
I think *that* is the question for the ages.
But still an interesting observation. I think I have received 0 tweets to my phone today even though they are posting on the twitter site