Using twitter as an outage notification

Sat Jul 4 15:33:02 UTC 2009

Roland Perry wrote:
> In article
> <16720fe00907040747k67ca1206kb871420deb5e8163 at mail.gmail.com>, Jeffrey
> Lyon <jeffrey.lyon at blacklotus.net> writes
>> 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.
>
> That's the kind of "marketing-led" response I was hoping to hear.
>
> But the UK National Rail system now uses Tweets to tell customers
> about disruptions on the trains, and several major UK government
> departments and news organisations use it for announcements and
> "Breaking News".
>
> So has it become "respectable" yet?
there are plenty of examples where twitter is being used for useful
notifications. in the sf bay area, there's a user maintained version of
what you describe for our commuter rail. a large example of this is
comcast's customer service (see http://twitter.com/comcastcares) 
personally, i like the twitter idea. i can follow/unfollow at will, i
can set up sms alerts for specific "users" i follow, etc. sure, twitter
had some stability issues, but i think if we're being fair, they've been
very stable of late. sure, twitter might be down at the same time, but
it seems more likely that the website for the provider in question would
be affected and twitter can be updated very quickly using a cell phone
either with a twitter app or simply via sms.

just my $0.02 worth (perhaps $0.03 and perhaps not worth over $0.01)

+m