Sometimes success can be a bad thing - especially if you haven't really planned for it in advance. That's what the designers of the new "Monopoly City Streets" game discovered yesterday, September 9th, when word of the game's launch circulated rapidly through Twitter, generating such a massive amount of buzz that the game suffered outages all day (and, in fact, is still completely down, as their servers are upgraded to handle the incredible traffic). It's the "Twitter Effect" again - the way that a topic, especially one that's associated with a particular website, begins to trend on Twitter, generating an incredible amount of traffic (and load) on a website.

Monopoly City Streets is a fascinating new massively multiplayer version of the classic Monopoly game, but played out on real streets and with real properties, using Google Maps as the underlying architecture behind the software. The game launched yesterday, September 9, 2009, and will run until January 31, 2010. Designed by Hasbro's digital agency, Tribal DDB, with assistance from Google itself, the game didn't receive an incredible amount of hype in advance - certainly not enough to overwhelm the servers on the opening day. Instead, it was the real-time buzz that brought the game to its knees, as its developers admitted on the Monopoly City Streets blog:

Digg users will remember the "Digg effect" - the way that articles that were promoted onto the front page of Digg.com, the popular social aggregator service, would often wind up causing the sites hosting them to crash due to the unexpectedly large spike in traffic, coming in all at once. The "Digg effect" was famous for sinking Wordpress blogs, which, without caching enabled, were often unable to handle the burden of generating PHP-driven pages each time they were visited. Although the "Digg effect" has largely been ameliorated thanks to built-in caching for CMS like Wordpress, the "Twitter effect" is an even more powerful force, one that even caching may not be able to mitigate.

When Monopoly City Streets ended up trending all over Twitter, it got upwards of two million hits - and that's only the hits that they were able to keep track of. Most users reported that the servers were completely unresponsive, meaning that their potential hits weren't even counted. That's the power of Twitter, and that's what Twitter users have been trying to explain to people who don't understand the benefits of a social network platform that's supposedly all about "people making a sandwich."

The fact that the game isn't actually working for most of the world doesn't change the fact that it's been, and will likely continue to be, a massive success, and a huge wellspring of goodwill for the Hasbro brand - it shows users that the game company knows how trends are changing, and the fact that it's circulating all over Twitter means that they're getting epic quantities of free advertising for the Monopoly game and the Hasbro brand. So the next time your CEO tells you to stop using Twitter, tell him that you're trying to tap into the "Twitter effect" - just make sure you're ready for the traffic if you really do end up on top of the heap!