Twitter’s Constant Stream Of Update Messages Suddenly Grinds To A Halt

Lucky for Twitter this happened on a weekend during the night (at least U.S. time) so most users won’t have even noticed. But it goes to show how dangerous it is to rely on a free third-party service for important communication.

This is just absurd.  Computer systems rarely go without glitches, particularly those that are scaling up. Think about all the times your paid services have been down.  If you spend any significant amount of time connected to the Internet, you’re familiar with outages.  The only time in recent years that I’ve found any outage to be unacceptable was when I was without my (former) main email account with Netidentity for two days.  And then a couple of months later it happened again. From what was reported, that the outages happened during upgrades, it was beyond unacceptable. That’s failing to plan ahead, plain and simple.  Inexcusable.

My point?  It is no more dangerous to rely on free services than it is to rely on paid services.  The only difference is that when it’s free, you don’t get to call customer service and complain.  That’s all.  In the case of Twitter, does anyone really think that its staff – and its investors – consider up-time any less important than the staff at your cable or telephone company?  Really?

When supposedly smart folks dole out horrible advice or commentary about anything to do with social media, I feel it’s important to point it out.

Used by people reluctant to engage in social media

There was a short thread over at the LinkedIn Web 2.0 group that answered this question.  Here’s what I wrote:

From a business perspective, Twitter is as much (or more) about actively listening as it is about providing “follow-worthy” content, links, concepts, etc. There are numerous google-able examples of how active listening on Twitter leads to business wins, particularly in the customer service area. I’ve personally gotten big wins with Embarq and Comcast through Twitter… and I’ve tweeted to the world their praises afterward! I also landed my photographer a wedding gig by responding to a tweet.  So, the “win-win” scenarios are particularly interesting with this cool new social tool.

I want to follow people I might do business with locally, those I might learn from, globally, and those who appear to fit my prospect/client archetypes. Toward this end, I use various Twitter tools and mashups like Twellow and TwitterLocal (and about a dozen others) to find people to follow. Last week I attended my first “Tweet-up” and actually met face to face with several of the folks I’ve befriended on Twitter (including the bride of the aforementioned wedding).

My friends need to get this stuff, so I’ll keep prodding.

I’ll get around to discussing treatments for those who suffer from Social Media Avoidance Syndrome (SMAS).  I wonder if these are the sorts of folks who decided about a hundred years ago that they didn’t ever see the need to have an automobile because the horse suited them just fine.

Sharon Stinner who writes about boomers on the Internet at Examiner.com makes a good point in contending that we are actually shifting from an “unnatural” set of communications practices back to a more “natural” set.  We’ve gotten away from some of the vital pieces of human interaction that make society and culture cohesive and instead have, in large part, allowed ourselves to be told how to think by purveyors of one-way communication processes.

No wonder the print media can’t seem to get its footing in the social media landscape!  It runs too much against its grain.