Don’t expect the Apple Worldwide Developer’s Conference in San Francisco to bring Twitter to a screeching halt this time. Twitter founder Biz Stone says the microblogging application is backed up and ready for a pounding.
“We’ve moved much of the load off our database by utilizing more memcache,” writes Stone, “employing more read-slave servers, and by fixing some bugs for improved efficiency. This work is in intended to help handle the load and keep Twitter up and running while Steve Jobs talks about all the new products and services Apple has planned.”
If that doesn’t work, Stone says his team is prepared to shut off features like stats and pagination to clear some necessary paths. Last January, when Jobs somewhat anticlimactically unveiled the MacBook Air, Twitter melted into a puddle of zeroes and ones.
Speculation about what Jobs will announce at 10 a.m. San Francisco time has been mounting all weekend. The most popular fabrication is that Apple will unveil the new iPhone, dubbed by some as iPhone 3G or iPhone 2. Of course, the hype around Jobs’s “one more thing” announcements often outweighs the reality.
Hitwise’s Robin Goad reports visits to the iPhone website over the weekend doubled previous peaks surrounding the launch of the iPhone in the UK and price cuts for the device.
Goad writes, “Looking at the latest search term suggestions report for ‘iphone’, 4 of the top 10 entries relate to an updated version: ‘new iphone’, ‘3g iphone’, iphone 3g’ and ‘iphone 2’.
Robert Scoble, though, citing an anonymous source he admits may know very little of the bigger story, is skeptical about a new iPhone announcement today. His source concurs with Forbes and other financial news sources that a new phone isn’t quite ready yet. The same source suggests there will be several new versions released this year.
Just in case, though, Samsung appears to want to steal a little iPhone thunder with its release of the Omnia – which will debut in Asian markets only, unfortunately. But with a 5 megapixel camera on board and a full Microsoft suite of programming—Blackberry users who couldn’t justify the iPhone switch may perk their ears up on that one—a US launch in time for Christmas could be music to a lot of ears.
There may be hope yet for those certain about a new iPhone. An hour before the keynote the Apple Store was offline while being updated. So, maybe…
