Nearly five hours of outages and instability have plagued social media micro-blogging Web site Twitter so far during the 2010 Soccer World Cup month of June.
This is according to Twitter's uptime reports published on Pingdom, which highlights October 2009 as the last bad month, which averaged just over five hours downtime for the whole month.
The unprecedented downtime in the first half of June has been attributed specifically to the spike in soccer-related Tweeting during the World Cup. The company admitted on its official blog that record traffic and unprecedented spikes are never simple to manage.
“However, we were well aware of the likely impact of the World Cup. What we didn't anticipate was some of the complexities that have been inherent in fixing and optimising our systems before and during the event,” wrote the company.
Twitter warns that over the next two weeks, users can expect more downtime as the site undergoes short planned maintenance. However, the company assures Tweeters that this will not be during any World Cup games and advanced notification will be provided.
Despite these outages, planned or not, Twitter is playing a strong information-providing role during this World Cup.
2010 online
During the last Fifa Soccer World Cup, in 2006, the concept of blogging had just emerged, Facebook was still new, Twitter had not yet been founded, and social networking was still in its infancy.
So says World Wide Worx MD, Arthur Goldstuck, who notes that the popularity of social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook has meant the 2010 Soccer World Cup has seen a lot of online social activity.
These sites have played a strong informational role while also offering an open discussion forum. Goldstuck argues that Twitter has a preferred offering to Facebook for an event such as the Soccer World Cup.
The immediacy of Twitter, together with the continuous stream of specific soccer-related content, trumps having to navigate specific Facebook pages to find information or voice an opinion, he states.
Twitter has a specific 2010 Soccer World Cup portal offering live widgets, real-time search, and Top Tweets.
Twitter has put together a special site to capture the spirit of the World Cup. Fans can connect with players, teams and brands using Twitter to join streams to specific matches. The social networking site also provides a list of suggested accounts to follow during the tournament and a World Cup theme for individual profile pages.
Socialise safely
Internet security firm, Symantec, predicts that with the spike in social networking activity, there will be a concurrent rise in fraudulent activity on the Internet.
Users are cautioned to resist the temptation to simply click on just anything, no matter how alluring it may appear.
The security firm also warns social networkers to beware of accepting new friends claiming to be likeminded football fans, and be especially wary of new sites set up around teams or specific players.
Travelling fans should not reveal details of their current whereabouts on the social networks. Criminals are known to monitor the sites and use this information to plan robberies, notes Symantec.
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