How we created a Twitter viral: the ePenis story

Since "friend" relationships are only one way, everybody builds the Twitted they want to see. That's part of its appeal and why it's so interesting to an experience designed like me :)

First, screenshot from Google Analytics of the period

http://files.marklancaster.org/images/bestactever_traffic_oc...

That was from time the domain was registered (I actually reg'd it on oct 3) to the time I stopped caring about it. I sold it sometime later to recoup the server costs (and got a little cash on the side). It was hosted on mediatemple, and version 1 of the site used way too much of their alloted monthly GPU usage. Here's another graph of the first day which I screenshotted at the time.

http://files.marklancaster.org/images/gpu.jpg

I ended up using about 2x the monthly GPU usage over the first 18 hour period before I took it down and the site iterated from a PHP version of the voting script to a JS version to try and distribute the processing power a little bit. If I recall correctly there were about 34 major iterations over that month period and countless minor ones just to keep several steps ahead of MTV.

MTV's traffic to their UK site went through the roof at the time

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/mtv.co.uk

This can be confirmed as I actually had someone inside MTV (who reached out to me first) sending me statistics of what was happening internally on their servers. Here is one of the screenshots (of many) I was sent from within MTV about the actual stats from their servers.

http://files.marklancaster.org/images/ema.png

You'll notice there is a point where there was no traffic, that was a few hours in which they took down the voting backend to make some changes to handle traffic. They actually took down the systems several times over the month (at one point a whole weekend to add another server - which was misconfigured and we ended up telling MTV about it so they could fix it... heh, misconfigured Apache)

It got to the point where MTV wanted to interview me about what was happening.

http://files.marklancaster.org/images/didwewinyet.jpg

And being interviewed by Wired was the high point of the whole thing for me.

http://blog.wired.com/music/2008/10/rick-astleys-on.html

But basically, the moral of the story is that the "smart people" on the web are vastly outnumbered. I think we often tend to forget that we're in the minority.

If the mantra is "make something people want", then one of the answers is "make something stupid"

EDIT - lots of edits to clarify and add metrics/screenshots.

There were many screenshots taken over that period as I catalogued everything I could when I had originally stated my intentions here on HN.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=323248

Back in the 1990s a bunch of us sysadmin types created an identical website where it graphed everyone's unix machine uptimes in a similar way (with variable length ePenises).

But back then, it wasn't twitter, it was just a small joke shared on IRC amongst friends. I had no idea back then we were 10 years ahead of the curve, and no idea that this sort of thing would reach global proportions and even start to be picked up and shown on TV.