"Flash Crowd" was a 1973 short story by science fiction author Larry Niven, one of a series about the consequences of instantaneous, practically free transfer booths that could take one anywhere on Earth in milliseconds. 1973 was a common year starting on Monday. ... Note that this partial list contains some authors whose works of fantastic fiction would today be called science fiction, even if they predate, or did not work in that genre. ... Larry Niven Laurence van Cott Niven (born April 30, 1938) is a US science fiction author. ... Earth, also known as the Earth, Terra, and (mostly in the 19th century) Tellus, is the third planet outward from the Sun. ...

One consequence, not predicted by the builders of the system, was that with the almost instantaneous reporting of newsworthy events, tens of thousands of people worldwide would flock to the scene of anything interesting—along with criminals, hoping to exploit the instant disorder and confusion so created.

Larry Niven has described the phenomenon known as Flash mob 30 years before it became reality. The only change of the idea in real life was: Instead of instant teleportation the crowds organized themselves by Instant Messaging and the Internet. A flash mob is a group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, do something unusual or notable, and then disperse. ... An instant messenger is a computer application which allows instant text communication between two or more people through a network such as the Internet. ...

In various other books for example in Ringworld Larry Niven has shown that easy transportation disrupted traditional behaviour and made possible new forms of Parties around the globe, spontaneous congregations or worldwide shopping. Larry Nivens Ringworld, seen from space. ...

Other reading:

• "Flash Crowd" is on pages 99-164 of the paperback edition of The Flight of the Horse, copyright 1973 by Larry Niven. The story (or parts of it) was originally published as "Flash Crowd" in Three Trips in Time and Space, copyright 1973 by Robert Silverberg, ed.

• "The Last Days of the Permanent Floating Riot Club" is on pages 41-52 of the paperback edition of A Hole in Space, copyright 1974 by Larry Niven.

• Other stories in this series are in these two books, and in All the Myriad Ways.

On the Web

On the World Wide Web, a similar phenomenon can occur, when a web site catches the attention of a large number of people, and gets an unexpected and overloading surge of traffic. A notorious example is the Slashdot effect. See hints how to deal with flash crowds (search for crowds keyword). Graphic representation of the World Wide Web around Wikipedia The World Wide Web (WWW, W3, or simply Web) is an information space in which the items of interest, referred to as resources, are identified by global identifiers called Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs). ... The Slashdot effect is a particular example of how a popular website can cause a smaller site to slow down or even temporarily close after causing a great increase in the number of visitors going to the smaller site. ...

See also

• Flash mob, real-life phenomenon invoving crowds gathering suddenly (without the benefit of teleportation), practical implementation of Flash Crowds
• Slashdot effect, analogous phenomenon in the context of web traffic