Using twitter as an outage notification
Steve Pirk
orion at pirk.com
Sun Jul 5 10:43:14 UTC 2009
On Sun, 5 Jul 2009, Roland Perry wrote:
>> There's the temptation by some of companies to leverage the latest
>> technology to appear "cool" and "in tune" with customers, but by far and
>> large, when something goes down customers either do no nothing, wait, or
>> call in. I think the best use of everyone's time is to make sure their
>> call
>> center/support desk has the capability to post an announcement to those
>> that
>> call in.
>
> It's a High School. They don't have a "support desk" (or more than handful of
> phone lines [1]). Even the local radio station can't cope with one call per
> school asking them to broadcast the news that they have closed due to bad
> weather.
>
If your resources are that tight, do what our local school district
did, mandate that all bus schedules will only be available on the web
site.
>> And then make sure something gets posted to the website.
>
> Unfortunately, the number of students polling the website for news means it
> can't cope with the traffic. I don't believe they can justify paying more for
> better web hosting, just to manage this once-a-year half hour event.
>
Roland, sounds like you should have a few "public service"
announcements saying that school closures will be delivered via a
certain twitter username. Also send a flyer home with the students.
The radio station can pick up the twitter feed like everyone else, and
announce closures. That is the way a certain group of people are doing
it in the middle east right now, word gets around and word gets
out... In your case, the community will know quickly, all from a
couple of people logging into twitter and sending a few messages.
Sounds like a simple, ideal solution given your budget constraints.
--
steve
More information about the NANOG
mailing list