By Daniel Hope
This morning I go to log in to my Twitbin sidebar to have a quick look at my @replies. In case you don’t know what I’m referring to, @replies are responses from other Twitter users who have included your username (in my case @tracksuitceo) in their tweet. This is done either in response to one of your tweets or they are simply mentioning your name in their post.
But instead of seeing my @replies I see the error message above.
In the interim while Twitter is offline I decided to do some macro-blogging (as opposed to micro-blogging). I want to consider what would happen if Twitter never came back online?
For my Facebook status I posted: Twitter is still offline. How am I supposed to get any work done?
I was only half kidding. Twitter has actually become a vital tool that I use regularly for personal and professional purposes. Vero Pepperrell, the UK Social Media blogger, replied in frustration, apprarently there is information she needs that is only available in other people’s Twitter feeds.
This really is no laughing matter and the possibility of permanently losing all of your tweets is not so far fetched. Just ask my friend Jon Carroll who occasionally wears a t-shirt, sent to him Twitter when they lost his original Twitter account. I repeat: they lost his entire account! It was on a server that was fried and that was that. A “Wearing my Twitter T-Shirt” shirt is great and all but hardly makes up for what was lost and the effort (not to mention wit) that was put into crafting those tweets.
The Value of Trust
How important is trust when it comes to online presence? I am looking forward to the release of the book Trust Agents by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith. This question is what the book addresses and judging by Chris’s success at gaining my trust, as well as the trust of thousands of others, I know this will be an informative and compelling read. I expect this book will become staple reading for anyone looking to increase influence or enhance reputation online.
The Importance of Listening
In my previous post I talk about the importance of listening when it comes to Social Media. Social Media is as much about receiving information as it is about pushing it out. The good news is that Social Media offers so many ways to listen.
At last night’s SEO Meetup I heard Ben Wills of Ontolo talk about identifying the websites that should be linking to you. Ben talked about the importance of strategically tracking what is being said online about you and your industry.
Ben suggests reading Andy Beal’s Online Reputation Management Beginner’s Guide. Here is a tip from that guide:
Create custom RSS feeds based on keyword searches: Feedster.com, Technorati.com, IceRocket.com, Google.com/blogsearch, Blogpulse.com, MSN Spaces, Yahoo! News, Google News, MSN News and PubSub.
When the Fail Whale Surfaces
Artwork by Etherbrian
Twitter is a tool that trust (or one that I want to trust) and it is also one that use for listening to the community; listening to what is being said about me and about others. But what happens when my listening tool is rendered useless?
I know that Twitter actually fell victim to a Denial of Service attack this morning, but still each time the Fail Whale appears the trust we have in Twitter is strained.
I love Twitter and will use it religiously … until something better comes along.
In the comments: What if Twitter never came back?
On Twitter: #permafailwhale
7 responses so far ↓
1 Jon Carroll // Aug 6, 2009 at 3:19 pm
It has been an interesting morning. So much of our (tech) lives has been built upon the back of Facebook and Twitter–some of us even indirectly rely on them for our livelihood, so it makes you stop and think when they go all belly up.
(And then it scares me when I think how it’s just a bunch of kids like us running these operations! =^) At least I got a t-shirt out of it.
Since today’s downtime was not a server problem, or through any fault (in theory) of Twitter’s own causing, it’s time for a different kind of fail whale: http://etherbrian.org/tweet/
2 Astrid // Aug 6, 2009 at 3:46 pm
That DOS attack almost gave me a HEART attack
3 TrackSuit CEO // Aug 6, 2009 at 3:53 pm
@Jon : I didn’t even mention Facebook being down. What a morning! The Failure Whalefire is very fitting. Thanks @etherbrian!
@astrid : I consider it a hate crime, cos I really hated it.
4 Vero Pepperrell // Aug 7, 2009 at 2:46 am
It made me realise that I should religiously bookmark to Delicious and/or Evernote anything I feel I might need at a later date.
It’s been such a long time since Twitter really failed, we’d all gotten a little bit too comfortable – they just had to shake us a little bit.
As for the Twitter tshirt, they tried to pacify me with one of those too. My username was originally “thatcanadiangirl” (as Vero was taken) but they truncated it to “thatcanadiangir” without the L due to changes to the system (15 chars max). Thankfully, they also freed up Vero for me a few months down the line.
5 Matt Gierhart // Aug 7, 2009 at 9:14 am
I think that if twitter dropped one day, it would be replaced soon. Friendfeed could pull some slack, a few others would come out of the wood work. You should check out Cody ?’s article titled “Myspace is to facebook as Twitter is to ________” He looks at a few possible future models for micro-networking.
But you’re right, it is about trust. For those businesses who rely a lot on twitter to build and form those relationships it’s a big deal. But you know what is a bigger deal, those relationships. Those relationships still exist weather twitter does or not. And those relationships will exist after twitter. If it’s a valued connection, then it’s bigger than the tool.
6 TrackSuit CEO // Aug 7, 2009 at 9:26 am
@vero – I agree about bookmarking! Have you ever tried Diigo?
@matt – You are correct about the connections being more valuable than the tool but how many valuable connections do you have on Twitter who you haven’t contacted outside of Twitter. If that avenue disappeared how easy would it be to reconnect?
These are the things I worry about.
7 Vero Pepperrell // Aug 9, 2009 at 3:42 pm
I’ll give it a try, Dan. Delicious is great, but I’ll have a look at Diigo, thanks!
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