Twitter: Scobleizer effect and viral marketing

Twitter has become a powerful medium for viral marketing and bringing traffic to a website. My hack: retweetrank, went viral all due to twitter. Tweets by Robert Scoble, Tim O’Reilly, Guy Kawasaki and tons of others (600+) made it easy for retweetrank to cross 30,000 users within 10 days.

One of the notable thing was the spike in site traffic after Scobleizer tweeted the link. Below is the graph showing requests/sec.

Here I coin (:P) a term: “Scobleizer effect“:

“Scobleizer effect is the phenomenon of a popular twitter user tweeting a link of a smaller site, causing a sudden enormous spike in the site traffic. The link spreads rapidly with several users retweeting the same and results in more small traffic spikes.”

Thanks to appengine, I need not worry about scaling.