Jobs Keynote crashes the blogosphere

I had to eat a little crow this morning. Yesterday I recommended that CNET One More Thing Apple blogger Tom Krazit use CoverItLive to liveblog the Steve Job Macworld keynote (see review: Ultimate Liveblogging Tool: CoverItLive). He declined. And good thing, too, since CoverItLive choked during the keynote. The failure was because of a minor programming slip-up, not the platform's inability to scale to hundreds of thousands of users, CEO Keith McSpurren told me. But it doesn't matter. In the liveblogging Superbowl, CoverItLive "tripped over its own laces," McSpurren admitted. Bloggers burned by the outage included CrunchGear, Fake Steve Jobs, MacDailyNews, and about 25 other blogs. Some sites posted messages sending their readers elsewhere, including to Twitter.

Sad Engadget

Which also failed.

With CoverItLive and Twitter out of action, traffic continued to pour into other, more traditional blogging platforms, many of which were already reeling under the load of having, basically, all of their regular readers hitting refresh every 5 seconds looking for updates. CNET's own blogging platform, which hosts the One More Thing blog as well as Webware, struggled and collapsed, generating error pages 23 percent of the time. Engadget failed, too.

To its credit, Gizmodo stayed up, although it did get slow, according to reports I got. I did not get any reports of TUAW failing, and people I know say that MacRumors' special liveblog site, MacRumorsLive, which has its own home-grown AJAX-based liveblog platform, did great.

This year's Stevenote liveblog fiasco reminded me of the 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge, in which the majority of the robot car contenders drove into walls or otherwise failed. Of course, in the second competition, in 2005, several cars finished, some spectacularly. Liveblogging is like that. The idea is great, the world wants it, but most of the platforms need more tuning.

[billburke3]

Ypou are so, so right.
These platforms need to tested until they are bullet-proof, which, unfortunately, requires humans to spend days trying to break them, and logging how they did do!
(read: Expensive!)

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[alex_mayorga]

All that for some unexciting "his Jobness" product announcements.

[alex_mayorga]

All that for some unexciting "his Jobness" product announcements.

[Kee Hinckley]

MacRumors did just fine. AJAX auto-refresh is definitely a way to keep things in control.
ArsTechnica also did well, despite manual refresh.

[rufustel]

Engadget apparently only went down for some users. I had no problem apart from 1 slow refresh out of dozens.

[pippicane]

over here in italy i couldn't get on TUAW or the macrumors site, while i was waiting 20 minutes to get more than ads off of engadget. where the european love, yo?

[larryedit]

Get a life. What does it benefit you, you family, or your friends if you hear or see what Steve Jobs says _at_the_moment_he_says_it_? The immediate gratification mentality caused a lot of grief and extra work for a lot of folks.

I saw in my local newspaper the following morning how This Year's Big Deal is a thin laptop with no CD/DVD drive. I guess users have to install or back up everything over wireless LAN connection. Do I have the gist of it? Hmmm. No liveblogs at all.

[david.r.jennings]

I had to bounce around for a while to find a news source that had not crashed. The MacRumors site did a great job and their interface was very nice to use.

I guess I'm just a little confused why Apple doesn't offer a live feed? I would much rather watch the live event straight from Apple, or one of their sub-sites, then tune in to get pop-up video style running commentary from C/NET or MacRumors or others?

[sachxn]

its high time we need to move to more robust AJAX.

Sachin

[nawckz]

AJAX does help significantly in reducing hits and improving the experience, but when you're dealing with tens or hundreds of thousands of people the server infrastructure is probably even more important - a great AJAX site will still fail if the servers aren't up to the job.