Using twitter as an outage notification

Sat Jul 4 14:50:08 UTC 2009

In article <4A4F5E3C.5040301 at gmail.com>, JC Dill 
<jcdill.lists at gmail.com> writes

>>>> That's a great idea, use some lame Web 2.0 trend to communicate with
>>>> actual real life customers. </sarcasm>
>>>>
>>> I would assume they figured it was better than just remaining silent.
>>
>> I'm about to recommend to an organisation that it [a twitter account] 
>>is better than posting news of an outage on their low-volume website, 
>>which will get swamped when too many people poll it for news.
>>
>> What does the team think?
>
>I don't understand why this is an either/or question.  Why not post to both?

Yes, that can be done.

What I'm trying to anticipate is the objection to *also* posting to 
Twitter, which might be raised on the grounds that it's too 
"unofficial", or "unsupported" or something like that.

>You control where we post.
>
>Just email the right address and we'll do the right thing.
>Post Everywhere?    post at posterous.com as usual
>Twitter?    twitter at posterous.com
>Flickr?    flickr at posterous.com
>Facebook?    facebook at posterous.com
>Tumblr?    tumblr at posterous.com
>Any other blog?    blog at posterous.com
>Posterous only?    posterous at posterous.com
>Combine them!    flickr+twitter at posterous.com

It's this richness which confuses the ordinary person. How are they to 
know which bit of the scattergun approach is the right one to use? Or 
whether "posting everywhere" has some hidden disadvantage.
-- 
Roland Perry