Twitter is an extremely popular service with millions and millions of users, and now those users can get Pingdom alerts delivered right to their Twitter accounts.

Twitter is an excellent complement to Pingdom’s uptime monitoring service, and we’re very happy to open up our service to Twitter’s huge user base. Even better, since Pingdom now has free accounts it becomes a great companion to webmasters with a Twitter account. Getting alerted of website downtime has never been easier and never cost less (i.e. nothing).

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We have entered a new era when it’s easier than ever before to get your opinion out there. Writing a short message on Twitter takes almost no effort at all and it is immediately published on the Web. Services like Twitter have amplified the word-of-mouth effect several times over.

For an extreme example, just check out the talk on Twitter when Gmail is down.

There is a parallel here to blogging. What regular blogging once did for word of mouth was to make it possible for anyone to become a publisher (going from “one-to-one” to “one-to-many” communication). This has now been taken one step further since even those reluctant to maintain a blog won’t think twice about sending out a quick message on Twitter or any other micro-blogging service.

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Yesterday a Twitter post (a tweet) by Mashable’s Pete Cashmore became so popular that traffic from Twitter crashed a blog. This sounds very similar to a common social media phenomenon originally known as the Slashdot effect (and later also the Digg effect), where a post on a popular social media site pushes more traffic than the target site can handle.

An interesting thing here is the mechanics of Twitter, which is fundamentally different from Digg and Slashdot. It’s not a social news site, with a front page that all visitors go to. We won’t go into the details of how Twitter works, that’s better covered elsewhere, but it’s worth noting that it’s a very different beast. It will be interesting times if Twitter is about to join the ranks of Slashdot and Digg as a potential “site crasher”.

For lack of a better word we will call the phenomenon of sites crashing as a result of traffic from Twitter, “the Twitter Effect”. (Or perhaps “the Tweet effect” would be catchier…?)

But now on to the big question: How could a single tweet generate that much traffic?

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We were curious about what people on Twitter are saying about Pingdom, so we used Tweet Scan (a search engine for public messages on Twitter) to look for tweets about us. Here are some of the tweets we found about our uptime monitoring service. We have thousands of users, so some of them were bound [...]

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