Fans of microblogging service Twitter are apparently impervious to repeated outages and technical problems--and their enthusiasm is spreading.
Research firm Hitwise on Tuesday reported that traffic to the Twitter site increased 500 percent the week ending July 5, 2008, compared with the same period last year. That's a significant jump for a service that's continually up and down--and still lacking a clear revenue stream.
What's more, many users of the service appear to be unruffled by Twitter's technical issues. The share of returning visitors has averaged approximately 53 percent over the past four months, according to Hitwise.
Twitter also still has a leg up over its few rivals in the microblogging space. Twitter traffic last week was 12 times higher than that of Plurk and 24 times higher than FriendFeed, Hitwise says. So even though Tweeters may be getting restless, not all of them are abandoning the service in favor of similar finds.
"Despite user complaints about outages, Twitter has remained the most popular among the micro-blogging services," Hitwise said in a statement.
Earlier Tuesday, rumors escalated that Twitter was in the throes of buying Summize, a Twitter search engine. Neither Twitter nor Summize have commented on speculation of a possible merger.
Former Microsoft spin-off Inrix on Tuesday will launch a new, nationwide traffic-prediction platform.
A new routing service combined with traffic data available for more than 800,000 miles of U.S. roads and location-based information is all part of the Connected Services platform Inrix hopes Web and mobile application developers, gadget makers, and car companies will be driven to adopt.
Inrix CEO Bryan Mistele says he thinks the new platform will lower the barrier to entry for developers and device makers.
"By wrapping it all together, this can do for telematics and navigation what YouTube did for video," he said in an interview.
One of the keys to the accuracy of the service is the predictive ability. Inrix uses historical traffic data, real-time road conditions--gathered from more than 750,000 devices used in cabs, commercial vehicles, and some GPS-enabled consumer cell phones--as well as local information like weather, school schedules, concerts, and sporting events--essentially anything that will cause delays. (Interestingly, Mistele says school schedules are one of the biggest variables of traffic in most major markets.)
Example of Inrix's 3rd Generation Routing Service.
(Credit: Inrix)The routing service also gets a bit fancier by using more than just posted speed limits, which as Mistele points out, not many adhere to, either by choice (speeding) or not (traffic). Inrix's Third Generation Routing Service provides traffic and info on best route and how long it will take you to get there.
None of this is available directly to consumers, but it should make it a lot easier to get more inexpensive and full-featured personal navigation and GPS devices.
Sports fans boosted ESPN's status in ComScore's latest measurements of Web site traffic, but the top sites kept their rankings unchanged during March.
ESPN jumped from 46th place with 17.8 million page views from U.S. visitors in February to 34th place with 22.4 million page views in March, the month of the March Madness college basketball tournament and the Major League Baseball season opening, ComScore said.
Sports-related online gambling sites also saw a surge, with Sportingbet's visitor tally jumping 35 percent to 975,000, ComScore said. Upickem.net and SportsBetting.com, while smaller, also saw major gains.
The biggest players, however, were unruffled by these blips, with the top 10 unchanged in their relative rankings.
Yahoo kept the top spot with 140 million page views. Next were Google, with 138 million page views; Microsoft, with 121 million; AOL, with 111 million; and Fox Interactive, with 88 million.
ComScore makes its estimates of Web site visitors and page views based on the surfing behavior of about 2 million people at home, work, and college, with statistical extrapolations to gauge total traffic.
The methodology, though, hasn't sat well with Web site operators such as MySpace who say traffic is much higher and with the Interactive Advertising Bureau, which last year asked ComScore and its rival, Nielsen/NetRatings, to submit their data to audits. (CNET Networks, which is News.com's parent company, is among the IAB board members that approved the audit request.)
News sites carrying coverage of New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer's resignation faced an onslaught of traffic Wednesday, but demand on the servers paled in comparison to earlier in the week when news of the sex scandal first broke.
Spitzer, who developed a reputation as a bulldog while attorney general for the state of New York, was a hot news topic on Monday, when allegations surfaced that he had hired high-priced prostitutes.
And on Wednesday, the former attorney general turned governor announced his resignation, a move that comes early in his term.
The New York Times, for example, faced a two-second delay in loading pages between 11 a.m. to 12 p.m. (EDT), which came right in the middle of Spitzer's 11:30 a.m. press conference to announce his resignation, according to Web site monitoring company Pingdom.com. In the hours prior to 11 a.m., the average load time on the site was half a second.
But that 2-second delay Wednesday paled in comparison to the 11-second delay The New York Times site faced on Monday, according to Pingdom.com. That slowdown occurred from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m.
That had the IT staff at the New York Times juggling servers, said Diane McNulty, a spokeswoman for the media company.
"NYTimes.com Web site traffic spiked after the Spitzer article was posted on Monday around 2 p.m.," McNulty said in an e-mail. "The hourly Web site traffic from 2 to 4 p.m. was 60 percent higher than the same time last Monday."
She added that The New York Times' mobile traffic nearly doubled during that time period. Traffic figures for Spitzer's resignation announcement have yet to come in.
Other sites carrying news of Spitzer's resignation include CNN.com, which offered live video coverage, as well as MSNBC News Service and Fox News.
Other New York news sites that carried the governor's resignation included the New York Post to Newsday to the NY Daily News.
And while traffic to news sites was heavy on Wednesday, it didn't compare to 9/11.
The New York Times Web site was overwhelmed by traffic on September 11, 2001, the day terrorists struck the city's Twin Towers. Readers had trouble accessing stories on the site, McNulty noted.
And two months later, when an American Airlines plane crashed in Queens after departing from JFK airport, the Times site had trouble dishing up pages, but not as bad as on September 11, said McNulty, noting the company has since increased its bandwidth by 10 times its previous levels.
I wrote a story on Wednesday detailing the problems Web publishers have getting accurate independent measurements on their audience. This is a problem that has plagued the Internet since Web sites started getting traffic and advertisers began targeting their ads to that traffic.
The focus of the article was on ComScore and Nielsen Online, the two largest measurers of online audience. I also mentioned a couple of other companies that are using multiple methodologies to compete with those companies.
I didn't mention Hitwise, a company that also measures traffic but doesn't really fit into the same category with the others. Maybe I should have.
Hitwise pioneered the development of a network or census approach to online measurement back in 1997, says Hitwise spokesman Matt Tatham. Of the 10 million U.S. Internet users sampled via partnerships with ISPs--the "largest online sample out there today"--2.5 million voluntarily provide additional demographic information such as age, gender, and income through multiple opt-in panel relationships, he says.
The firm specializes in offering daily checks on traffic from more than 1 million Web sites, including smaller ones that don't hit the radar of the bigger audience measurement providers.
Unlike ComScore and Nielsen Online, Hitwise does not extrapolate the data out, and does not report unique users, just percentage of actual visits to the sites, Tatham says.
Advertisers use the unique visitor data to set ad rates, despite the discrepancy between the third-party figures and the figures publishers see internally. Hitwise, meanwhile, focuses on providing competitive intelligence and strategic marketing help to publishers, and not traffic figures to ad buyers, according to Tatham.
UNION CITY, Calif.--On a cool, overcast morning in the parking lot of a Lowe's hardware store, 100 UC Berkeley students lined up in rows ready to jump into a bevy of idling vehicles.
With media and VIPs from companies like Nokia, Navteq, General Motors, BMW, and CalTrans looking on, wave after wave of students left the parking lot to drive a 10-mile stretch of the nearby 880 freeway as part of a large-scale experiment to test how cell phones can monitor and predict traffic.
The test, conducted all day Friday, was put on by the California Center for Innovative Transportation (CCIT) as a joint project between Nokia, CalTrans, and Berkeley's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.
Each student car was issued a Nokia N95 phone with GPS and special traffic-monitoring software developed by Nokia's Palo Alto, Calif.-based research lab--plus a Bluetooth headset. As the students drove the freeway, the phone sent data about each car's speed and position back to the company's research facility. The data is compiled and used to predict traffic patterns and help drivers get where they need to be quickly. Nokia hopes that one day the system could be a significantly cheaper way to track traffic than the permanent sensors installed in roadways or next to them because it uses equipment most people already own: cell phones.
Alex Bayen, a professor of civil and environmental engineering and lead researcher on the project for Berkeley, called the experiment "a glimpse into the future of traffic information collecting and data processing."
An obvious concern is privacy, and one that Bayen was quick to address. The information sent from each phone is designed to keep each "moving traffic sensor" anonymous. When the information is sent to Nokia, Bayen says all of the personal identifying information is stripped from the data, and encryption methods on the level of what banks use is employed to keep information private. Also, the traffic monitoring software only broadcasts information when it senses the phone has entered a specific area, like a highway. It does not track the phones that are on cul-de-sacs, for example.
The data from the phones will be sent back to the Nokia Research Center where a team will analyze the usability of the data and determine what comes next.
Nokia Chief Technology Officer Bob Iannucci, who was on hand for the field test, said this particular project is moving at a more aggressive pace than most of Nokia's research because of the potential impact of the experiment. The phone maker hopes to expand the experiment from 100 to possibly 1,000 people soon. And instead of participating in a one-day test, users would be invited to use the traffic monitoring software in the course of their daily routines.
To see CNET News.com's video of the experiment, click here.
PR wonk and buddy Joshua Weinberg sent me a rant that the driving time app and interactive map on the Bay Area's 511.org Web site is down, "due to a high volume of users." It's a pretty stormy day here in the Bay Area, but as Weinberg points out, it's during storms and emergencies, when public transit is a mess, that people will go to state-sponsored route-finding systems.
The error message's advice to use the text version is flawed: It, too, is overloaded. Google's traffic maps are working, though. Leave it to private industry to provide better emergency services than our tax-supported agencies.
That's ok, I'll use Google.
See yesterday's Dept. of Missing the Point on another navigation product.
Members of the SavetheInternet.com Coalition and Internet scholars from Harvard, Yale and Stanford law schools filed a petition and complaint with the Federal Communications Commission Thursday in response to claims that Comcast is blocking some kinds of peer-to-peer traffic.
The complaint comes after the Associated Press discovered, based on its own testing, that content was blocked on several Comcast broadband connections using the peer-to-peer filing sharing network BitTorrent. Other Comcast users have also complained that their BitTorrent content has been blocked.
In their petition, the groups claim that Comcast is violating the FCC's Internet Policy Statement, which essentially states that consumers are entitled to access all applications, services and content of their choice. A footnote to the policy acknowledges that Internet service providers are able to engage in "reasonable network management."
The FCC issued its policy in 2005 after the FCC reclassified DSL and cable modem services as information services, which as a result eliminated "open access" requirements for phone companies and cable operators. The SavetheInternet Coalition was formed to urge Congress and the FCC to reinstate and enforce laws to prevent discrimination by these broadband providers.
Comcast denies that it blocks BitTorrent or any other kind of traffic, but the company believes that it does have the right to shape its traffic to manage its network.
"As the FCC noted in its policy statement in 2005, all of the principles to encourage broadband deployment and preserve the nature of the Internet are 'subject to reasonable network management,'" David Cohen, executive vice president for Comcast said in a statement. "The commission clearly recognized that network management is necessary by ISPs for the good of all customers."
But the groups filing the petition say, "No plausible technical or economic reason suggests that blocking particular applications is a reasonable way to manage a network."
The groups are asking the FCC to clarify its policy so that it specifically states that "intentionally degrading an application or class of applications is not 'reasonable network management' under the FCC policy statement."
"Last year, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin and opponents of Net neutrality told Congress that the FCC has all the authority it needs to prevent exactly this sort of customer abuse by a major provider," Harold Feld, senior vice president of Media Access Project said in a statement. "Now we come to the acid test. Will the FCC, which vowed to protect our freedom to run the applications of our choice, stand up for citizens in the face of Comcast?"
But the truth is there isn't much that the FCC can do at this point. Under the current regulations and laws, the FCC has little to no power to do anything, even if it becomes blatantly obvious that Comcast is intentionally blocking traffic. The reason is simple. The FCC Internet policy is simply that. It's a policy. And there is no real enforcement muscle behind it that would require Comcast to do anything. So until a Net neutrality law is passed or the FCC imposes some kind of regulation or rule, which Chairman Kevin Martin has been adamantly opposed to doing, not much is likely to come of this complaint.
I'm working on a more in depth story on this subject that will be published later today or tomorrow, so stay tuned.
DAVIS, Calif.--Reporters who covered software in the '90s will remember Karl Jacob. Microsoft bought his company, Dimension X, in 1997. He was chatty. Occasionally, some reporters referred to him as "sources close to the company."
After leaving the big M, he went off to Keen, Benchmark Capital and a few other things. And now, he's the world record holder of the standing mile speed record.
This Viper runs on ethanol.
(Credit: Michael Kanellos/CNET News.com)In July, Jacob cranked up his modified Dodge Viper from a standstill to finishing a mile in 27.41 seconds. He hit 220.7 miles an hour during the sprint, a record. The old top speed for the standing mile was just under 218 miles an hour. He did eight runs on the day.
Jacob didn't drive the car on the record run. Instead, it was driven by Ron Misjak of Super Viper, which modified the car. In any event, Jacob did pay for it, has driven the car and says it's a kick. That puts him ahead of Alcibiades, who won a first in chariot racing at the ancient Olympics without getting behind the reins. (It was a common practice among the nobles.)
We spoke at the green car pavilion at the GoingGreen conference in Davis. Karl and Ian Wright of Wrightspeed showed off their performance cars. Others were showing off low-speed electric vehicles.
Jacob and a team of mechanics had to tinker quite a bit with the Viper. They boosted the horsepower from 500 to 1,200, for one thing. Additionally, they switched it from running regular gas to running E85 ethanol. E85 comes with an octane rating of 105, higher than regular gas.
The engine
(Credit: Michael Kanellos/CNET News.com)"It is not common knowledge that you can convert these cars (Vipers) to E85," he said. But apparently, it's pretty easy. All you have to do is upgrade the fuel lines, change the engine's computer and alter the timing.
More than doubling the horsepower probably had a big effect on the performance of the car, but the extra octane can't hurt. Ethanol also cuts down on the greenhouse gases from the tailpipe. Fast clean cars are sort of a fad. Earlier this year, a 1965 biodiesel-burning Impala that beat a Lamborghini in a drag race. Electric sports cars, meanwhile, are coming to market.
Overall, the Viper and its modifications cost about $200,000. Good thing Jacob worked at Microsoft.
Davis, Calif.--This is truly a creepy presentation, this one being delivered by Kamal Hassan, CEO of Skymeter.com right now at the GoingGreen conference in Davis, California.
The company has come up with $130 boxes that, when placed in cars, lets the authorities turn public roads into toll roads.
"You could price every road in the state" with enough cars, he said. The cars also have to have GPS units.
Gee, thanks.
The company doesn't have signed contracts yet, but apparently toll roads are growing in popularity. Singapore has been putting in more toll roads since 1998, he said. Germany and the U.K. have ramped up activity. Dubai, the city-state of crazy drivers, recently put some more in. Many cities in the U.S. are studying it more.
"I can tell you five cities in Asia and three countries in Europe" that want to do more truck troll roads.
Right now, these cities collect tolls by erecting toll gates, which cost $1.3 million.
Toll roads will cut down on greenhouse gases by cutting down driving and put the burden on paying for the roads on the people who drive the most, according to Hassan.
But honestly, who looks forward to toll roads. On the upside, the box that the company puts in can also give drivers maps and other info.
