Twitter: Down at 10:00 PM CT

Jan 30, 2008 | blog

Doh! Again?

Earlier today when Twitter went offline, I was only marginally annoyed.  Mainly because I had a lot of work to get done.  I’m quite surprised tonight when I pop on to check out what’s been happening for the last several hours.

Hmm, now I’m frustrated.  First time I’ve felt that way towards Twitter.  Not sure I really like that either.

Come on guys, this has got to be addressed.

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Happiness CXIV

Jan 30, 2008 | happiness

Happy that the fuel line on my truck didn’t freeze last night or on the drive in to work.  Brrr…

Twitter: Down at 8:50 AM CT

Jan 30, 2008 | blog

Ok, I’m just keeping a record of when Twitter is down.  Like now.  The Twitter home page at this time:

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This is the kind of thing that everyone is worried about when talking about Twitter.  It’s becoming an extremely useful tool, to the point that some people will claim it to be crucial to their daily communications.

Reliability is a key requirement, and I do know from posts on the Twitter Blog and from news that their looking for staff to monitor and maintain solely from the reliability perspective.  As an IT consultant & engineer/architect, I can be patient, I can understand the problems that scaling and massive growth can put on a platform.  However, many simply see these outages as inability to compensate, or worse, neglect.

Twitter’s engineers and management team will prevail, of that I’m sure, but it’s the timing that I worry about.  Even many of it’s most prominent users are becoming more vocal in their concerns about the service.  Shel Isreal posted An Open Letter to the Twitter Guys on what Twitter needs to address.

With all the talk of how simply useful Twitter is, the “Twitter Guys” need to take note of how important it has become to hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people world-wide.  I believe they know, but suggest as Shel does, that they need to communicate more directly, and with more information on what their doing, especially when they’re having some stability problems.  Like today.

Reading from the Twitter Spigot

Jan 29, 2008 | blog

social-networking As the size of my Twitter Village has grown, the volume of traffic has also had a dramatic increase.  There are literally dozens of conversations going on at any one moment.  So how does one leverage the strengths of Twitter while being doused with the minutia that makes up a Twitter stream?

Simple.  By realizing that you can only participate in relevant conversations.  Kind of like walking down a street and hearing random bits of conversations.  You don’t always make sense of everything, and most often, you don’t need to.  It’s really about being able to join in when you want, or when your wanted.  It’s not about “keeping up” at all.

Yes, I tend to skim a bit, maybe one page back at most.  All I’m really looking to do is understand what the current conversations are before jumping in.  Odds are that my contribution may have already been brought to the conversation and I just like to understand where it’s going before committing some random thought.

Having a larger and larger number of Twitter followers, and following a large number isn’t as hard as I had thought it would be.  Moreover, I’m learning a lot more about the community that I’m a part of there.  Over the past year, I’ve met a lot of people, and have gotten perspectives that I otherwise would not have had a chance to learn.

Twitter is one of those tools that you really can get value from.  It doesn’t replace the blog, or special-interest social networks.  Instead it’s an essential tool for the social media explorer’s kit – one that offers much more than it’s simple interface lets on.

What’s your experience as your Twitterverse expands?

Happiness CXIII

Jan 29, 2008 | happiness

The stark cold beauty of a subzero Minnesota winter day, with swirling snow and opaque clouds of breathless wonderment.

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