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

Roland Perry lists at internetpolicyagency.com
Sat Jul 4 14:43:16 UTC 2009


In article <F832A12A-0AED-4A01-955D-E24DCA6181C8 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 ?

The website is hosted elsewhere, however the entire message can be 
delivered in one Tweet, so there's no need to confirm by looking at a 
website.

>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.

They don't plan to respond to email in real time.

>Note, BTW, that twitter itself is subject to frequent planned and 
>unplanned outages.

The question being, how often will they co-incide with the events I'm 
trying to track?

fwiw, I've been using twitter for about three months now, and have never 
encountered either kind of outage.

-- 
Roland Perry




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