Yesterday BigBlueBall once again felt the full impact of the Digg Effect. This time it was an article on the segmentation of the instant messaging market, with AOL and Google teaming up against MSN and Yahoo.
At about 4:45, I left the house for a 3-mile walk. At the time, the story had about 24 diggs. When I returned less than an hour later, it had jumped to over 400 diggs. The number of users online at BigBlueBall hit a new all-time high of 5,182.
Of course, this spike in traffic wreaked havoc on my server. My Gmail inbox was overflowing with database connection error alerts, meaning that a lot of people who tried to visit were greeted instead by a lame error message. I’m going through the process of optimizing the server to handle larger loads, but it takes a bit more of that precious, limited resource called "time" and I won’t be able to dive completely into it until this weekend.
Meanwhile, as of the time of this post, the story has now been dugg 925 times. I digg it.
technorati tags: IM, Digg, BigBlueBall
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