Thanks for all the great toys, Uncle Steve, but did you have to go and break the Internet? I and about 7,000 other people were all signed up to get Twitter updates from MacRumors, but I never saw a single one — and in fact the entire Twitter.com network was virtually unusable for several hours, with one message trickling through every 20 minutes or so. I had several friends send messages saying the entire Internet was slow.
As my friend Paul Kedrosky notes, you could almost see the sparks and smell the burning gears as the Interweb tried to handle the load. Even your alter-ego, Fake Steve Jobs, got creamed by you and all the live-blogging hordes clogging up the Internet with all the details of your wonderfulness. He couldn’t get Twitter to work, after also failing to make CoverItLive work as a live-blogging platform. Even the Apple store was down at one point.
CrunchGear.com was another site that tried to cover the keynote with CoverItLive, the app I featured recently — which I still think is an excellent solution, but appears to have been unable to handle the combined weight of billions of Apple fans’ hopes and dreams, each one clicking refresh every two seconds at Engadget or Gizmodo.
Speaking of which, Engadget was slow to awful much of the morning. The best site of all: MacRumorsLive.com, which had an Ajax auto-refresh. You other guys ever heard of Ajax? You should check it out.
Update:
There’s a message from Keith McSpurren of CoverItLive at CrunchGear apologizing for the failure of the live-blogging app, saying it was effectively a “loose screw” that took the whole service down (and for extra points, check out the back-and-forth ribbing between Mike Arrington and John Biggs in the comments at CrunchGear).