Imagine that you have just written a post on your blog, tweeted about it and watched it get retweeted by some popular Twitter users, sending hundreds of people to your blog at once. Your excitement at seeing so many visitors talk about your post turns to dismay as they start to tweet that your website is down — a database connection error is shown. Or perhaps you have been working hard to generate interest in your startup. One day, out of the blue, a celebrity tweets about how much they love your product. The person’s followers all seem to click at once, and many of them find that the domain isn’t responding, or when they try to sign up for the trial, the page times out. Despite your apologies on Twitter, many of the visitors move on with their day, and you lose much of the momentum of that initial tweet . These scenarios are fairly common, and I have noticed in my own work that when content becomes popular via social networks, the proportion of mobile devices that access that content is higher than usual, because many people use their mobile devices, rather than desktop applications, to access Twitter and other social networks. Many of these mobile users access the Web via slow data connections and crowded public Wi-Fi.
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