Some of you may recognize that Twitter’s recent downtime issues are a result of its architectural problems exposed by its rapid growth. However, back in the day (that is, January and the preceding months), Twitter used to crash the old fashioned way — when large events would bring a burst of usage. One of those events was the last Steve Jobs keynote at MacWorld in January.

Now another one is upon us.

Jobs will give the keynote at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) on Monday morning (10 AM PST). The question is: Given Twitter’s current state is there anyway it can stay online during the whole event?

The smart money is of course on “no” — but Twitter has surprised before, staying up for the majority of this year’s South By Southwest (SXSW) conference despite everyone believing it would crash and burn.

The next question is: What is everyone going to use if Twitter does go down? Sure, you could just constantly reload the websites covering the event (including VentureBeat), but it will probably be more efficient to get news via a micro-messaging platform.

The problem when Twitter goes down is that all of its users fragment over a number of sites. FriendFeed, Pownce, Jaiku, Brightkite — these are all contenders for the sloppy-seconds. Which one will you use if Twitter fails during WWDC? Let me know and I’ll try to meet you there. We need a back-up plan.

I’ve contacted Twitter to see if it was working something, such as disabling certain features, to help the service live through the keynote. I’l update if I hear back.

update: Twitter co-founder Biz Stone tells me that Twitter does in fact have a plan in place to stay up during the keynote. He also notes that they have a fun idea for the event (he didn’t elaborate on what). He also said that the backup plan is in fact to disable certain features as needed to keep the service up.

[Twitter is a nominee for best mobile company at MobileBeat2008, VentureBeat's conference on July 24]

written by Jose Castillo

Disney has teamed with Google Earth to create virtual tours of the four Walt Disney World theme parks and all of the twenty two Disney World resorts. Upon completion, it will feature 1500 3-D click-able maps of the attractions, resorts and restaurants.

Walt Disney Parks and Resorts chairman Jay Rasulo stated “It’s a virtual walk-through of the whole property … the most amazing virtual tour of any place in the world.”

Commenting about the Google Earth’s Disney project, maps director John Hanke stated “It’s “truly innovative and unique.”

When launched, the virtual world will be accessed through either disneyworld.com/3dparks or earth.google.com.

A team of eight photographers spent ten days photographing all aspects of Disney World. The pix were next created in 3-D. During the start up phase, exterior shots will be featured with interiors to be added later on. A similar project for Disneyland Resort Paris is underway.

written by Jose Castillo

Every time the Apple Store has some downtime, magic seems to happen, especially if it happens to be a Tuesday. Not surprisingly, we get a flood of emails from excited readers a few minutes after the yellow sticky note goes up, letting us know that we better be on our toes when the store comes back up. Follow that with some obsessive site-checking and collectively, that’s a lot of manual labor. It’s about time we started automating the process.

Pingdom, purveyors of website monitoring services, have produced a badge that puts the status of the Apple Store on your web page, blog, and maybe your dashboard with a web clipping. Pingdom does the work of pinging the Apple Store once per minute to determine its current state, and provides you with an image indicating up or down which is embedded in an iFrame. Simple, but effective.

So, save the wear and tear on your mouse and grab the badge rather than hitting refresh all morning this Tuesday. Pingdom also has a downtime history going, and an analysis of Apple’s “marketing by downtime.” After all, it is quite a well-planned marketing scheme, if not a growing national pastime for Apple fans.

Read

written by Jose Castillo

Weblog MakeUseOf highlights five lesser-known Firefox tips, including one simple tip we’ve never covered before:

Instead of right-clicking on a download link, choosing “save to target” and pressing enter, just drag the download link to the “downloads icon” in the toolbar. The download will start automatically.

You can actually drag download links to either the Downloads icon (which needs to be added to the toolbar manually through the Customize… option) or directly to the Downloads manager. It may not be fancy, but it does save the default multiple-click download process. Aside from the simple download tip, the post suggests other previously mentioned Firefox tips like deleting mistyped or unseemly URLsfrom your address bar or search box. Got your own favorite obscure Firefox tip? Let’s hear it in the comments.

Five Firefox Tips You May Not Know About [MakeUseOf]

[Via Lifehacker]

written by Jose Castillo

Sounds like the video download game isn’t as easy as the biggies make it out to be. Wal-Mart, whose download store has been open all of a year and a couple of weeks is already shutting down, apparently abandoning the effort after its tech partner HP discontinued whatever technology it was running the thing. Bonus for (former) Wal-Mart Video Downloads though: according to the FAQ, all downloaded videos are users’ to keep, and no one’s bound to keep the Wal-Mart Video Download Manager on their machine anymore. Of course, it’s still DRMed to hell, so short of stripping the copy protection, you’ll only be able to play “your” purchased videos with the machine on which you bought it — and nothing else.

[Via Engadget]

written by Jose Castillo