Using twitter as an outage notification

JC Dill jcdill.lists at gmail.com
Sat Jul 4 15:02:13 UTC 2009


Roland Perry wrote:
>
> 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.
Anyone who makes that argument is just showing how little they know 
about Twitter.  It would be like complaining you shouldn't use email 
because "not everyone has email".

>> 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. 
That's a lot like saying Perl is too complicated for the ordinary person 
so never use Perl.  :-)
> 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.

You can configure it and use it however YOU want.  If it's too confusing 
to use it selectively - sometimes posting in all places, sometimes 
posting in just one place, then configure it for your preferred use and 
use the regular "post everywhere" method each time you post.  For 
network outage announcements it would work perfectly to post to Twitter 
and your company blog(s) in one step.  Bonus - if it can't reach one 
system at least the post gets posted on the other system.  For this 
reason your company may want to setup a shadow blog on one of the free 
blogging platforms, in addition to a blog on the company website.  This 
way if your website is down, the news on the other blog is still out 
there for those that follow the blog to find/read.

The configurable aspects of posterous are most helpful for people who 
have more diverse posting habits - who want to post news to some (but 
not all) channels, who sometimes post chatty things they want to go to 
facebook, sometimes post business things they don't want to go to 
facebook, who post photos they want to go to flickr and facebook but not 
their blog, etc.  If you are active with social networking it would be 
perfect.  I you just use it as an announcement tool, just use the defaults.

jc





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