As every iPhone developer knows, Christmas Day is the busiest day of the year, as millions of people unwrap their shiny new iPhones and promptly go on an app download spree (I’m sure Android sees a similar phenomenon). Which means it isn’t terribly surprising when Bump, a Sequoia-backed startup that makes it easy to share data between phones, says that today is the biggest day of traffic it’s ever had. Then again, the fact that people are currently sharing 20 photos per second is quite impressive.
Bump CEO David Lieb says that Bump’s traffic is currently 2.4 times as high as it was a week ago, and that the service is on pace for 2 million shared items today, with a peak load of 30 items per second (in addition to swapping photos, you can share music, contact information, and calendar events using Bump).
These numbers are especially interesting for one big reason — Lieb says this is the first time the company has disclosed any traffic stats at all. Granted, the data obviously isn’t representative of Bump’s daily average, but it still gives some context about usage of the service.
For those that haven’t used it, Bump lets you quickly swap data between two phones by simply tapping them together (both phones obviously have to be running the Bump application). Bump’s applications have been downloaded 25 million times across the iPhone and Android since the service launched.
Lieb says that even aside from today’s big numbers, Bump usage is on the rise. This has been driven in part by the launch of music sharing in November (which is already the second most-shared type of file, behind photos). And last Saturday the service enabled ‘long-distance connections’, which lets you exchange messages with friends in your address book and from Facebook, without having to actually physically ‘bump’ your phone with them.
