Only ten weeks have passed since considerable fanfare was attributed to Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) becoming the first Twitter account to surpass one million followers, beating CNN (@cnnbrk) in the process, which hit the magic number shortly afterwards.

Since then, another twenty-three accounts on the network have moved beyond seven digits; fittingly, @Google is the latest, and they celebrated the occasion earlier today with this tweet.

Moreover, four Twitter users now have more than two million followers – Kutcher, Ellen Degeneres (@TheEllenShow), Britney Spears (@BritneySpears) and CNN. Kutcher is quite a ways in front – some 300,000 on Ellen – and @Oprah should join this group in a couple of weeks.

At the back of the pack, @NPRPolitics should be the next account to breach one million, with @Mashable and @MCHammer duking it out for the #27 spot.

I’ve discussed the benefits of breaching the one million mark – it’s a big deal for anybody with something to promote, like a brand or a blog. Even if we assume the relevancy and interests within these networks is quite small, such as 10-20 per cent, that’s still a huge number of people who will click on your links, certainly over the course of a month. Despite what many think, it does matter, and as these numbers build to 10, 20 million, and more, over the next year or two, the people at the top of this hill are going to have enormous power and influence, if only in all the websites they break with a single re-tweet.

I was active on Twitter last night when the news of Michael Jackson’s cardiac arrest broke on TMZ. When the same website reported that he had died about an hour later, the impact on the internet was dramatic. This situation was then furthered by the world looking to confirm TMZ’s report – when CNN and the BBC (finally) legitimised the news, the internet almost stopped.

• The Los Angeles Times was one of the first major publications to state that Jackson was dead. When CNN mentioned this as a source, the LA Times website was brought down by the traffic influx, receiving over 2.3 million page views in one hour.
• Twitter went into a 5-6 minute delay. I saw the fail whale for the first time in weeks. TweetVolume reported that more than 65,000 tweets reported on the original TMZ story within the first hour – around 5,000 per minute at peak. “We saw an instant doubling of tweets per second the moment the story broke,” Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told the Los Angeles Times. “This particular news about the passing of such a global icon is the biggest jump in tweets per second since the U.S. presidential election.” Ultimately, updates about Jackson would double Twitter’s update frequency, and the singer currently occupies seven of Twitter’s ten top trending topics.
• The number of status updates on Facebook was triple the average. Despite this, Facebook remained operable throughout.
• America Online’s AIM instant messenger product – which was undergoing some minor scheduled maintenance around the time of the Jackson news – was severely impacted by the story and went down for 40 minutes. “Today was a seminal moment in Internet history. We’ve never seen anything like it in terms of scope or depth,” an AOL spokesperson said.
• An edit war on Jackson’s page on Wikipedia ultimately forced the online encyclopaedia to freeze.

Traffic to all the leading online news websites in North America was 20% above the average.

Earlier the same day, Farrah Fawcett also died. After Jackson’s death was confirmed, false reports of the passing of Jeff Goldblum and Harrison Ford put more pressure on global web servers.

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Twitter’s API Lead Alex Payne has been speaking at the Twitter 140 Conference and I’ve already written today about his announcement that Twitter might be adding geo-referencing data to all tweets – you can vote on my poll about this here.

Alex also mentioned that Twitter will add a new feature similar to the ‘like’ option on Friendfeed and Facebook, which lets users vote up a submission. Twitter already has a ‘favourite’ feature which allows us to save any tweets we desire (I keep all my ‘links of the day’ in mine) but it’s not heavily-used by members, possibly because it isn’t heavily profiled. There’s been a lot of talk on Friendfeed about how good their ‘like’ feature is to Twitter’s ‘favourites’, and as Robert Scoble, arguably the single-greatest Friendfeed advocate on the planet, took the interview with Alex Payne, one has to wonder who did most of the pitching.

(Alex also stated that Twitter might be adding comments to tweets, which is also a feature on Friendfeed and Facebook, as well as Plurk. I’m fine with this, although I’d very much prefer if it came in threaded messaging format, with a reply link on each comment, as on Friendfeed in particular long runs of responses can be a real pain to follow.)

Here’s my concern, though: the ‘like’ feature is dumb. Really dumb.

It’s dumb on Friendfeed, and it’s even dumber on Facebook, where users regularly ‘like’ things like plane crashes, bomb explosions, the death of Mike Tyson’s daughter and many other tragedies. Depeche Mode fans seem to like the cancellation of concerts, and I also regularly see people liking things that are about them, or that they have written and others have then submitted. Keep that ego in check, won’t you?

It’s not really their fault, as the ‘like’ is essentially the only option they have. But grammatically, and in any reasonable measure of decency when it concerns traumatic events, like is a major fail.

Twitter doesn’t need a like. What it needs is a share.

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There’s an interesting article today over at Techrader that outlines some of the plans Twitter is making for the future of the platform, as provided by Alex Payne, Twitter’s API lead.

(Image source: Techradar.)

Alex is definitely saying all the right things. On scalability:

“Hopefully we’ve already been through the catastrophe phase. Where we’re at now is very, very different; fundamental pieces of our technology have changed. We’ve built out a really robust system; it doesn’t just handle tweets, it handles every operation around the site. Whenever you’re sending a direct message, whenever you’re adding someone, whenever you’re blocking someone it goes through this system we’ve built.

We’ve pitted it against the other big enterprise grade message queue systems out there and we’ve pretty much smoked them all in terms of benchmarks.”

On the development of the tweet:

“In a perfect world we’d like every tweet to have its own key value store for whatever metadata [developers] want. In terms of implementation it’s still too far off to say when we’re going to deliver that; the majority of our team is still focused on handling the scale of the social graph.”

On the future of Twitter’s API:

“It doesn’t make sense to have apps ask us again and again ‘do you have anything new? Do you have anything new?’… Whether that’s data or changes to the social graph, it makes more sense that we push that information to them so they’re always up to date.”

On this, Twitter plans to introduce a ‘push API’ service and also to release the limit of API calls that external applications can make, which is currently set at 100 per hour per user.

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Yesterday I had a blast at the Media140 conference, London’s first micro-blogging event. The crowd was enthusiastic and intelligent, and there was some excellent discourse amongst the panellists and speakers, and some great queries were raised (and in some cases, answered, at least in part).

I suspected that for some of the journalists present there was as much fear as there was excitement about the micro-blogging platform and its potential and ramifications for the newspaper industry (as well as the individuals therein, hence the concern), and this is certainly understandable. Principally because Twitter, the entity and the network, and their own plans and ambitions, are unknown quantities.

I’m a huge fan of the television series Lost. As of this moment it’s my favourite show on TV, and quite possibly all-time, too. The show sizzles with exceptionally groundbreaking, innovative content, and has and will continue to have a huge influence on the industry.

The thing is, like many fans (and, indeed, critics), it’s hard to shake the feeling that they might be pulling a bit of a fast one on us – that they’re just making it all up as they go along. The sixth and final season begins later this year – unless the last few episodes are absolute world-beaters, even if they’re not ‘winging it’ week-to-week and had an A-to-Z plan from day one, a lot of people are going to feel really cheated. It will still feel like they didn’t have a clue; that they just got lucky.

This, too, is my worry for Twitter – that the founders, Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey, completely fluked into something that became popular and influential, but now don’t really have any idea what to do with it. I was chatting to some folks at the Media140 after-party yesterday and the majority are apprehensive about Twitter’s plans. We’re concerned that the time and effort we’ve invested into the service is exponentially increasing the risk of it not paying off, both in a monetary and philosophical sense. Reward, after all, comes in many forms, and we’re all making deposits into the network.

The key questions for both Twitter and Lost remain: where is this all going? And will we like it when we get there?

“The Ultimate Goal Is To Become A Very Broad-Reaching Utility.” ~ Biz Stone

Biz Stone interviews well. He seems a likeable guy and generally says the right things. In this video he talks about the value of Twitter, and makes good points about how even the most vapid tweets have the potential to become hugely significant; from lead to gold, if you will, borrowing his comparison to alchemy.

Which is all well and good. But the quality and impact of tweets on the network doesn’t actually have anything to do with Twitter themselves. They just provided the platform – all of the content is generated by us (and their 47 employees, few of which, somewhat disturbingly, seem to have much idea how to use the service). We could all be tweeting about cures for cancer, or we could all be tweeting about what we had for lunch. While the intellectual capacity of the former has a far greater value for Twitter (and the world) than the latter, the end result – the data – is not something Twitter can actually control. It’s either going to be of great value, or it’s not.

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