The apple special event went down today and brought down FriendFeed to a large extent – dropped Leo Laport’s Ustream Channel with horrific feedback on the audio channel from the site, twitter for a change was not the fail whale – it was slow but serviceable throughout the event.

Only Apple or a major national disaster could bring the social sites screaming to a halt like this. This made for a really miserable experience with the online environment when it comes to live casting an event that can draw more than 80,000 viewers to Leo Laporte’s UStream channel. The feedback on the audio channel was also painful – but also showed some serious weaknesses in delivery of huge streams of data over the social networking systems. The next step for social networking is going to be provisioning bandwidth and server capacity to support huge crowds, and the only service I noticed that did well was UStream.

Here is a collection of crash screens on social systems or web sites that tried to do coverage of the live event. If anything – this makes for a compelling reason for getting more bandwidth to cover huge fanboy events like an Apple Event.

FriendFeed Crash

Engadget

Twitter though held up very well and didn’t crash but it did noticablely slow down during the entire event – although points have to go to Leo Laporte for peaking on UStream at 115K viewers at the height of the show with Steve Job’s walk through of the product.

This shows some serious weaknesses in how social networking can provision for very large crowds, and should be something that all social networking sites should be doing before the event. Ensuring that services do not crash during the show.

Kudo’s though to UStream and Twitter for once – they were able to manage the traffic loads.

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