Twitter traffic doubles over last New Years Day

In case anyone doubts Twitter’s increasing popularity, New Years Eve celebration tweets reached 16,197 posts per second yesterday per Paul Lilly. That’s up 160% over last years New Years tweets of 6,366 per second.

Unfortunately, Twitter had trouble keeping up with the demand. Yesterday morning Twitter was down for a period of time.

Though we’ve seen the ‘Fail Whale’ at Twitter now and again, Facebook, with even more traffic, never seems to fail.

That’s because Mark Zuckerberg is a fanatic about not be ‘Friendstered.’ The primary reason Friendster, a popular social networking site, died was because it couldn’t handle the volume of usage it had. Zuckerberg demands regular drills to make sure that doesn’t happen to his company.

To Twitter’s credit, it has invested its money in infrastructure from the beginning. Rather than invest in developing a business model that would bring in revenue early one, Twitter invested in technology that would allow it to scale with growth.

As a result, Twitter failures are few and far between.

Twitter stayed up without a glitch on the deaths of Bin Ladin (4,000 tweets per second) and Michael Jackson (5,000 tweets per second). In Twitter’s earlier days, much less traffic would have caused it to crash.