On August 12 at 8:47 pm PST a friend I’ll call Liz posted on her FaceBook profile on a little YouTube video called Performance by MC SpandX, otherwise known as YouTube user Robin Moore. How Liz stumbled upon it, I don’t know, but this discovery initiated a chain of events that help pushed the video to ‘viral’ status.

At 10:20 pm that evening, Liz sent a ‘tweet’ to Lance Armstrong, who is a very active member of the Twittercommunity, having 2,051,935 followers (today’s count) and tweeting several times a day.

@lancearmstrong Hey Lance, you might want to check out this video: Performance http://bit.ly/s3XnP

The next afternoon, at 4:44 PM, Lance posted this simple tweet on his profile:

It’s all about performance. http://bit.ly/s3XnP

When tweeting, it’s common practice to shorten website address links (URLs) in order to get the most from the 140 character count maximum, so most likely Liz used a program called Tiny URL to reduce the video’s address from its original 43-character URL – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vn29DvMITu4 to a unique 19-characters URL – http://bit.ly/s3XnP.

Since each Tiny URL is a one-shot deal, meaning that a new unique Tiny URL is generated if you were use shorten the original URL again, we can see that the Tiny URL in Liz’s tweet is the same one Lance used – a simple cut & paste job. Someone over at @lancearmstrong had indeed watched & retweeted Liz’s Performance link. Since then, Twitter has been responsible for generating 45,364 views (on last count), many, if not most, originating from Lance Armstrong’s August 12th post, according to the video’s statistics. Performance has now been viewed 897,822 times – by far the most popular cycling-related music video of our time.

It’s all about Performance, that’s the name of the game….

I pump up my tires and I oil my chain…