Twitter Palin Peak

Twitter has seen much media coverage lately, particularly during heavy usage periods like the Gustav and Hannah hurricanes and of course, during the nation’s nomination of it’s highest elected officials. Seems that even the most respectable and resistant users have finally come aboard and are actively tweeting.

A couple of days ago the Twitter blog posted an image (shown above) which shows the dramatic increase of tweets per second that occurred during Governor Palin’s speech. The news media is all abuzz over the seemingly exponential growth of Twitter users, but this rate of growth was designed into Twitter’s architecture.

Twitter is a platform engineered upon the “viral expansion loop” concept. This concept, when done right, virtually guarantees self-replication – because that’s really all a “viral expansion loop” is, a system that naturally doubles and triples and quadruples till its much bigger than anyone ever expected. Because these systems typically start small, the media tend to dismiss them as a a great idea that no one cares about. Also, very typically, the media have to go back and eat their words in 12 or 18 months when these platforms have replicated to the point that they can no longer be ignored. That’s certainly the case with Twitter.

Now that Twitter is being taken seriously in mainstream media because of the elegant way it helps users broadcast what’s going on in their world, the media’s surprise is certainly laughable. Necessarily Twitter will have peaks during times of nationwide interest, such as the RNC. But Twitter’s increased uptime has helped it to manage this predictable boost in tweets per second on its servers.

Twitter is built on a viral expansion platform – it was designed specifically to exploit viral loops. Why the surprise? Any ideas?