The Brits bring down Twitter for the first time. Mainstream media coverage glut surprises the tech geeks

Last night the exiled Jonathan Ross returned to his prime time TV slot on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross. One of his special guests was Stephen Fry and as you may know, those two celebs are two of the highest profile Twitter users in the UK. So it was no surprise when they chose to bring up the topic of Twitter on the show last night. Here's the clip for you to see in all its glory. 

I woke up this morning to see Twitter being covered on BBC Breakfast news, in The Telegraph and all over the internetz. The web is alight with Twitter's new found mainstreamhood (look! new word!). And Twitter as a system is straining just a little. Could it be? Are mainstream people flooding to Twitter? Who knows. 

But as you'd expect, the traffic floods to Twitter after a succinct flood of coverage in the media in the UK and it cracks under the pressure. Twitter users are right now reporting glitches in some of the core functions, like following (it's quite funny, thought, that the American tech geeks are completely unaware of the reason why. Jonathan Ross? TV? Newspaper??). Twitter glitches happen whenever something major occurs in the media that sends too much traffic to the Twitter system. Recently Twitter broke at Obama's inauguration and at Apple's most recent product launches at Macworld. I just like that its now a bit of British telly that's giving Twitter a run for its money. And perhaps bringing Twitter into the mainstream (properly). 

As ITV's Ben Ayers said last night, even Facebook never managed such levels of endorsement from big name stars (as far as he knows :)

Comments

[Rax Lakhani]

Hi Drew

Insightful post as per usual. I've started seeing Twitter being mentioned everywhere of late.

Many of these mentions are justified and they merit their place on the news agenda (Chinese earthquake being reported first on Twitter, the TwitPic photo of the Hudson River plane landing, Obama's inauguration being played out on Twitter, etc.).

However, I feel that this new journalistic 'toy' may encourage lazy editorial used to stalk celebs as they Tweet out their thoughts and ideas to their fans.

I recently touched upon this on my blog, so all comments are welcome!

Click here to read "The media wants to play with Twitter but ‘lacks imagination’"

Keep up the good work ;)

[Paul Stallard]

It just goes to show you how the power of good PR can have a positive effect on a product. It is also a great example of how a good story can push a product far better than the technology behind it.

People don't care how Twitter works but they are interested in following and getting closer to celebs or getting a cool picture/news first. Companies need to realise this if they want to engage with the public more efficiently.

[Richard Trenholm]

"even Facebook never managed such levels of endorsement from big name stars"

No, but Twitter and Facebook are fundamentally different things: Facebook is about sharing with your friends and keeping private from everyone else. Celebrities have MySpace for social networking with strangers. Twitter meanwhile is not a social network, it's a micro-blogging platform, and following isn't befriending (because it's not reciprocal) - it's basically just bookmarking that feed. Following is simply signing up to read someone's output, no different to bookmarking or subscribing via RSS.