Landon Donvan FTW
By now, you've heard about the amazing US victory in the 91st minute of their World Cup match against Albania Algeria*. It really was incredible, and probably a pretty seminal moment in USA soccer.
* Honestly, I wanted it so badly to be Albania, and solely so I could have a reason for singing the "Albania, Albania, you border on the Adriatic...your land is mostly mountainous, and your chief export is chrome" song from 'Cheers' - sung by Coach as a memory trick to remembering facts for a geography class. But no, it was Algeria, and I have no songs for that. See the bottom for what I'm talking about...
I'm only writing it about here for two reasons -- one, after it happened, Twitter absolutely went down, for what seemed like a really, really long time. When it finally came back upped, I jokingly tweeted that Donovan had broken Twitter.
It turns out, I underestimated that one by quite a bit -- he almost broke the internet:
Just how breathtakingly, heart-stoppingly awesome was Landon Donovan’s 91st-minute goal in today’s win-or-go-home U.S.-Algeria World Cup game? It was definitely significant enough to temporarily overwhelm Twitter. And it just might have been the single biggest driver of Internet traffic ever.
Over at Mashable the editors were monitoring new traffic across the Web via Akamai’s Net Usage Index, a traffic meter that keeps real time tabs on how many visitors per minute are landing on more than 100 major news sites. In the minutes after Donovan’s game-clinching, elimination-defying goal during added stoppage time, Web traffic spiked to 11.2 million visitors per minute, eclipsing even the 2008 U.S. presidential election as measured by the viewers per minute metric
That's pretty crazy. But I'm really posting this now so that I can watch THIS over and over and over again:
http://www.twitvid.com/player/SSHNL
Thanks to my man Will Brinson for the link as well.
Here's the Cheers video referred to above:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-F_tT-q8EF0&hl=en_US&fs=1&]