Using twitter as an outage notification (was: Fire, Power loss at Fisher Plaza in Seattle)

Sat Jul 4 15:26:16 UTC 2009

Le samedi 04 juillet 2009 à 16:58 +0200, Michael Hallgren a écrit :
> Le samedi 04 juillet 2009 à 10:47 -0400, Jeffrey Lyon a écrit :
> > Personally, I find it difficult to take Twitter seriously. It seems
> > like more of a kids toy than a business tool. Something like a
> > blogspot account would make a lot more sense.
> 
> Yes.
> 
> What about (continue to) use old email (inc lists), coupled with 
> some roughly out-of-band like cell/pots/sms service? And in parallel 
> old irc, et al. 
> 
> Any severe problem with, asking us to move over to "portal 
> services"?

Of course not negative with respect to new innovative means... But if
we didn't have pidgin: msn, yahoo!, gtalk, icq, facebook,... ... 
would be hard to manage... and remember who's message to track via
what channel...

So, the channel I think is much dependent on the audience. The crowd
small enough, most any means will be fine. The crowd more universal,
well-known, stable communication protocols should be a natural
choice. No?

mh

> 
> mh
> > 
> > Jeff
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > On 7/4/09, Marshall Eubanks <tme at americafree.tv> wrote:
> > >
> > >  On Jul 4, 2009, at 6:17 AM, Roland Perry wrote:
> > >
> > >
> > > > In article
> > > <786BA8C0-B534-40FF-9126-1E33BD11CB3C at americafree.tv>,
> > > Marshall Eubanks <tme at americafree.tv> 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 if the outage takes out their website too ?
> > >
> > >  I don't think that their website was up, and I would guess that they didn't
> > > have email either. That
> > >  is a bad situation to be in.
> > >
> > >  Note, BTW, that twitter itself is subject to frequent planned and unplanned
> > > outages.
> > >
> > >  Marshall
> > >
> > >
> > > > What does the team think?
> > > >
> > > > Paying a lot more to host the website with higher "burst" capacity during
> > > an emergency, isn't an option.
> > > >
> > > > The only other idea I've had is to sign all the customers up to receive an
> > > SMS via some sort of broadcast service (the news will fit easily in one
> > > SMS).
> > > > --
> > > > Roland Perry
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >
> > >
> > >  Regards
> > >  Marshall Eubanks
> > >  CEO / AmericaFree.TV
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > 
> > 
-- 
michael hallgren, mh2198-ripe