Blackbeard Blog: Blackbeard Blog - What Would 9/11 Be Like In The Social Media Age?
quartzcity
· 3 months ago
Information may have become more diffuse and decentralized, but there's an immanent (if not already ongoing) crisis with respect to the networks underpinning Twitter, Facebook, etc. Twitter especially is barely one step ahead of collapsing under the load. If the traffic from Michael Jackson's passing was enough to clog up the works (or even just the furor of Gmail being offline for a couple hours), what would a 9/11-sized event do? How about another Loma Prieta-sized earthquake in the Bay Area that knocks out most of the server infrastructure off the air? Or AT&T collapsing under the load of every iPhone user attempting to upload photos and video?
During the Iran Elections there was some movement in creating distributed/portable Twitter servers. I hope that the coders behind it keep working on it.
Maybe we should go back to USENET? nntp is still a highly robust protocol.
curiouslypersistent
· 3 months ago
No2 is definitely my defining memory of 7/7 on LiveJournal - people checking in - not only for themselves but others they had been in contact with
All Comments
During the Iran Elections there was some movement in creating distributed/portable Twitter servers. I hope that the coders behind it keep working on it.
Maybe we should go back to USENET? nntp is still a highly robust protocol.