February 4th, 2009
After Slashdot Effect and Digg Effect, Twitter Effect
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After Mashable! founder Pete Cashmore’s tweet was retweeted so much that it crashed a blog, Royal Pingdom suggested that we may be seeing the beginnings of the Twitter Effect, or websites crashing as a result of a traffic surge from Twitter –
If we take a stab at formulating how a single tweet can garner so much traffic, it would be something like this (which essentially describes the reach of a tweet on Twitter):
The Twitter Effect formula = (Original tweet * followers) + (retweets * followers of retweeters) + (retweets of retweets * followers of those), and so on.
This way, tweets can spread out like the branches of a tree or a root system and reach a very large number of Twitter users. The spread is basically only limited by the size of Twitter’s user base. If the tweet contains a link to a site, this site is bound to get a significant amount of traffic as the tweet spreads.
I think that Twitter is fundamentally different from Slashdot and Digg because there is no “front page” (each one of us has a separate one).
Stephen Shankland at CNet offers more reasons why it might be premature to talk of a Twitter effect: very few tweets contain links, very few people retweet tweets, and a tweeted link needs to be really interesting to be retweeted often enough to cause the website to crash.
