Using twitter as an outage notification

Sun Jul 5 13:37:59 UTC 2009

Roland Perry wrote:
> In article <4A50A3C9.3080009 at airwire.ie>, Martin List-Petersen
> <martin at airwire.ie> writes
> 
>> for those type of notifications, it's perfect, also because it's not
>> part of your own infrastructure.
> 
> From an operational resilience point of view, that's a very important
> feature.

It's the main reason for choosing something like twitter, blogspot etc.
If you want to communicate an outage, it might be as bad as your
infrastructure is gone, even though that you'd might hope, that you've
designed your network in a way, that it never happens.

But let's just take the scenario, where some event basically whipes your
ASN of the face of global BGP :) . It doesn't have to be a physical
outage, that causes it.

Talking about monetizing twitter, there's a very simple approach, just
based on this type of service:

Service Providers, Carriers etc., that use Twitter can pay a monthly fee
for the service and twitter sends them responses, private messages etc.
by more organized means.

Just my 2c on another approach, but I can see that happening and I
wouldn't mind paying a few bob for the service.

As for some responses on this tread and also some reactions from a few
customers (childish, "my kids use twitter, i don't", etc.):

- some people think twitter is a hype, that's ignorant in my eyes. Sure
it's overhyped by some, it doesn't make twitter a hype.

- some people think twitter is a child's toy. It can be used as such,
but that's not it's primary function or intention.

- some people say it's the next Google. I can pretty much see, where
that idea comes from. Real time search, while Google didn't pick very
fast up on the fires (Seattle, Toronto), you'd be able to find tweets on
them within minutes on Twitter. It would take hours before any of it
appears on Google.

- and as the last thing, with companies like AT&T, authorize.net and
various others using it for service notifications or interaction with
customers, my above point actually is just even more valid.

Calling it a lame web 2.0 is pretty much off, when it's actually used
for something sensible.

Just my 2c

Kind regards,
Martin List-Petersen
-- 
Airwire - Ag Nascadh Pobail an Iarthair
http://www.airwire.ie
Phone: 091-865 968