Trends Hut

 Trends Hut


Would you believe that Justin Bieber  and his legion of fans use up 3% of Twitter’s server infrastructure at any given time — such a large amount of activity that “racks of servers” are dedicated to Bieber mania?
So said a Twitter employee, according to web designer and blogger Dustin Curtis. Yesterday he sent out the following tweet:

“At any moment, Justin Bieber uses 3% of our infrastructure. Racks of servers are dedicated to him. – A guy who works at Twitter”

When we asked Curtis who the Twitter employee is, he said his source is someone “who would know such things. I obviously can’t give you his name. But I trust that the information is absolutely correct.” So maybe you’d better believe it. Bieber consistently appears on the top Twitter trends chart we publish each weekend, and he topped a “Twitter’s most listed” chart too.
We shot an e-mail Twitter’s way to confirm, and while the Twitter rep we contacted didn’t confirm the figure, she didn’t discourage us from believing it, either. “While we don’t break out metrics like this, everything around and about Justin Bieber is consistently popular on Twitter,” she said.
Curtis also tweeted that “most of the popular users on Twitter have dedicated servers for their accounts.” He believed the Twitter employee and tweeted what he said in part because he thinks the numbers make perfect sense:

“Every time Bieber tweets, his messages have to be delivered to more than five million people who then endlessly retweet it. Apparently, his account receives more than 60 @-replies per second for a while after he tweets, which is something Twitter wasn’t originally designed to handle.”

He’s certainly no Justin Bieber, but Curtis isn’t totally unknown on Twitter himself. He appeared in our “10 Web Design Bloggers You Should Follow” list a couple of months ago.