Re: Using twitter as an outage notification (was: Fire, Power loss at Fisher Plaza in Seattle)

[Roland Perry <lists () internetpolicyagency com>]

In article <F832A12A-0AED-4A01-955D-E24DCA6181C8 () americafree tv>, 
Marshall Eubanks <tme () americafree tv> writes

> > > > That's a great idea, use some lame Web 2.0 trend to communicate with
> > > > actual real life customers. </sarcasm>
> > > I would assume they figured it was better than just remaining silent.
> >
> > I'm about to recommend to an organisation that it [a twitter account] 
> > is better than posting news of an outage on their low- volume website, 
> > which will get swamped when too many people poll it for news.
>
> What if the outage takes out their website too ?

The website is hosted elsewhere, however the entire message can be 
delivered in one Tweet, so there's no need to confirm by looking at a 
website.

> I don't think that their website was up, and I would guess that they 
> didn't have email either. That is a bad situation to be in.

They don't plan to respond to email in real time.

> Note, BTW, that twitter itself is subject to frequent planned and 
> unplanned outages.

The question being, how often will they co-incide with the events I'm 
trying to track?

fwiw, I've been using twitter for about three months now, and have never 
encountered either kind of outage.

--
Roland Perry