If you’ve not seen Twitterfall it’s quite nice. It streams in Twitter messages with certain keywords in real time. It makes twitter feel like a bit joined up community (which it isn’t really). What really freaked me out was watching it during the Gmail outage so I grabbed some video of what it looked like:
It’s strangely compelling to watch. In spite of the complete drivel that’s being poured onto the internet.
In the 9 minutes or so that I was capturing this the number of messages in the queue went from zero to 1,800. That’s more than 3 people a second assuming that Twitterfall capture everything. All whining about the same stuff.
I think it’s the first time I’ve really ‘felt’ the scale of Twitter. It was a bit overwhelming really. I dread to think what it’d be like to feel the pressure on the Googleplex.
Thanks to Jonathan for pointing out the Twitterfall.