Microblogging services - Plurk, Twitter, Jaiku and more
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2010-01-05 09:39:39 - Graham Ellis
Yesterday, there were 10,000 downloads of this image from our web site, and if you click on the image, you'll get a full sized copy and see that it's 1600 x 1200 pixels and nearly a megabyte in size. So that's some 10 Gbytes of traffic! I know I'm quite well followed in some quarters, but this is ridiculous!.
A quick analysis of my log files, and I see that the picture is being called up from URLs such as http://www.plurk.com/song4u, and the IP addresses seem to point mostly to Taiwan ... it looks like my buffet lunch picture is hotlinked from someone's "Plurk" account, and my image has been used in their plurking. Does this sound a bit like Twitter and Tweets? Am I *really* out of date and I should have moved on from Twitter to Plurk ... perhaps to Jaiku ([link]) which is the Google offering, I understand ... or to Identi.ca, Qaiku or Brightkite? I found a comparison on Twitter v Plurk [here], which actually says that they're both microblogging services but not really comparable, and I then found a Wikipedia page which compares them(!!) and various others, [here].
I'm "on" Twitter - my automatic feed is [here] but is seems to be patchy in how it performs (must look at that - the intermittent bugs are always the worst!). More importantly, I'm [here] on LinkedIn ... and I'm blogging daily and on various forums too. So I'm going to skip over the other "microblogging" sites for the moment - there just aren't enough hours in the day.
So what am I going to do about all those hits that I'm getting from Taiwan? And what are they costing me? We're very fortunate that we have plenty of bandwidth on our hosting; unchecked for the month, it could perhaps have been an expensive issue, but I've chosen to move the picture to a new URL and replace it with the one seen on the right of this paragraph - down from 1 Mbyte a go to 10k per go. There's little point in me putting up too much of a sales message (I've nothing to sell to Taiwan), and if I started slinging mud or putting up adult images, some of the mud could come back and stick on me.
OK .. Tweet Feed solved. I changed my Twitter password but had left my script unaltered. Duhhhh! I've written before - [here] - about automating a Twitter feed. I haven't shown you the error message that you get when you use the wrong password in the script - it's:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<hash>
<request>/statuses/update.xml</request>
<error>Could not authenticate you.</error>
</hash>
I HAVE written, before, about the need to check return statuses in production code, and I commend this problem as a good example of why you should do so!
Yesterday, there were 10,000 downloads of this image from our web site, and if you click on the image, you'll get a full sized copy and see that it's 1600 x 1200 pixels and nearly a megabyte in size. So that's some 10 Gbytes of traffic! I know I'm quite well followed in some quarters, but this is ridiculous!.
So what am I going to do about all those hits that I'm getting from Taiwan? And what are they costing me? We're very fortunate that we have plenty of bandwidth on our hosting; unchecked for the month, it could perhaps have been an expensive issue, but I've chosen to move the picture to a new URL and replace it with the one seen on the right of this paragraph - down from 1 Mbyte a go to 10k per go. There's little point in me putting up too much of a sales message (I've nothing to sell to Taiwan), and if I started slinging mud or putting up adult images, some of the mud could come back and stick on me.