Twittering Eurovision Points to P2P Solution?
by Ewan Spence
Last weekend saw The Eurovision Song Contest, where 43 countries choose a representative song, perform it live in a telecast that goes out to upwards of 100 million viewers around Europe (and upwards of 300 million worldwide). I sat down last Saturday to watch the contest, in a room full of Eurovision enthusiasts, lovers, and critics all throwing out their opinions, drinks in hand.
Of course we weren’t all really together – we were logged on to Twitter, throwing out bards about the camp costumes, the immensely tribal nature of pop music, and the incredibly… err… artistic graphics between the songs. Three hours of music and politics (don’t ask, please, simply put all war in Europe stops on the night of the contest and we fight using votes). As one participant said at the end of the gig, “Thank you Twitter, you all kept me sane.”
But the point here isn’t to celebrate the Song Contest (much as I do) As more international events pop up on the horizon, the luster of modern communication tools, especially those with a real time component such as Twitter, Jaiku, IM clients and of course the rather old but still functions even if everything else seems to go down IRC are going to be the place to chat and converse about both international events. The upcoming Summer Olympics are going to be a major stress test of the public’s use of these tools (as opposed to say an Apple keynote). On the evidence of Eurovision, Twitter’s not quite ready yet – the database went down as the event started and it switched to a ‘limited’ service to stay up, but resource management in instant communication can’t afford to be 99.99% up if the one time that everyone wants to talk is when it goes down (because that’s when it’s popular).
One reason why IRC stays up is it is effectively distributed around multiple computers. Twitter, for all the latest bells and whistles, relies on a central point. Modern messaging is going to have to cope with messages of greater bandwidth, with much lower latency, and that leaves very little room for failure. I think it’s a fair bet that any new globally adopted messaging system is going to have a distributed element to it, and dare I say it heavily biased around peer to peer.
Oh and if you want my opinion, Norway was robbed, Ireland should at least have made the finals, and the UK sent a Bin-Man, came last, and were surprised they didn’t do any better…
