Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
Re: The best site?
Author: Joshua Allen Posted: 11/9/2000; 11:20:59 AM Topic: The best site? Msg #: 21972 (In response to 21956) Prev/Next: 21971 / 21973 CBS Marketwatch gave good mention to abcnews.com, which was the one I used. The U.S. map had hover-over live counts that were usually way ahead of CNN, and you could click on the state to get live counts of issues, percentage counted, etc. (the click through page wasn't too visually appealing, just a table with the numbers). They also apparently had some way to interact with the TV broadcast, though I didn't try it. Sorry to paste the whole article below, I couldn't figure out how to make the URL work..
Internet wobbles under crush of election traffic
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 2000 5:29:00 PM ESTBy Andrea Orr
PALO ALTO, Calif., Nov 8 (Reuters) - As the world waited on Wednesday for the state of Florida to recount its ballots in the ultra-close U.S. presidential race, many big Internet news sites failed to stand up to the crush of visitors, sometimes even posting tallies that were nearly a day old.
One Internet user got an afternoon "update" on CNN.com (http://www.cnn.com) listing only 23 of the 50 U.S. states -- a long-outdated scored card that had Gore ahead by a narrow electoral count of 12 to 11.
MSNBC.com similarly offered some visitors an electoral vote count showing Bush with 144 and Gore with 160 at a time when both candidates had more than 240 and only Florida's 25 hanging in the balance.
And even on sites that were able to keep the news pretty current, delays of up to a minute getting onto a desired page were not uncommon.
"We actually thought we had prepared enough, but obviously we didn't," said John Nicol, general manager of MSNBC.com, jointly operated by Microsoft Corp MSFT and General Electric Co's GE NBC television network.
Nicol said the MSNBC site never crashed but was often slow to load pages and update them.
MSNBC, which like the state of Florida, was still counting all its visitors from the past two days, said it appeared that Tuesday's traffic to its site totaled around 6 million unique visitors, about double the old record set in July when a Concorde jet crashed outside of Paris.
And, it said early indications were that Wednesday's traffic would be double Tuesday's record levels.
In anticipation of heavy traffic, MSNBC had doubled the number of computer servers it had supporting the site, and "lightened" some of the pages to remove advertisements and other graphics to help pages load more quickly.
Keynote Systems Inc. KEYN, a Silicon Valley company that tracks different Web sites' performance, reported an overall deterioration by early Wednesday morning.
It said the New York Times Web site (http://www.nytimes.com) was showing a "terrible performance" with pages taking close to two minutes to load at some points, and USA Today's (http://www.usatoday.com) site got slower as the uncertainty over the election continued.
Web sites have traditionally limped during peak news events like the death of Princess Diana and the release of the Starr Report detailing President Clinton's affair with a White House intern.
Still the continued failure of so many top Web sites to perform as consistently as old media sources like television or radio raises questions about whether they will ever be able to reach such a level of reliability.
MSNBC emphasized the strides that had been made since the last presidential election, when most big news sites crashed for a good part in the day. But it said it was constantly having to upgrade its technology to meet growing traffic.
One Web site that performed better was ABCNews.com (http://www.abcnews.com), which continued to load pages in under three seconds as its election day audience tripled the old record number of visitors.
But ABCNews was careful not to gloat, saying it faced bigger challenges going forward, as even more people used the Internet for election updates, and demand for news over wireless devices grew from a now minuscule number in the tens of thousands.
"I have to say there but for the grace of God go I," said ABCNews.com general manager Bernard Gershon, referring to some other rival sites that were left limping. "I'd like to pat myself on the back and say we have the best team out there. We were prepared, but we were also lucky."
Rtr 17:29 11-08-00
Selector Code: reucoCopyright 2000, Reuters News Service
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