Today (6th August 2009) Twitter’s been down for a few hours (about 1510 BST).
Update at 1556 (how very exciting!) – Twitter is under attack. Man the barricades! Your country needs you!
And now (according to Twitter Status) it’s back up (at 1630). All is well with the world (assuming it does recover – dont’ like that continuing to defend
).
TweetDeck displaying nothing at all
I run a couple of sites that use Twitter for news. It makes sense for many reasons: it’s immediate, takes about half an hour to develop and is really easy for non-technical users who maybe don’t want the hassle of logging into a CMS (what’s a CMS?) and don’t have the time to write full posts. If the user gets into it they may start connecting with some useful contacts.
Here’s what I’ve noticed:
- Sites that pull in tweets from a Twitter feed have been slowed down
- Using Twitter (or any API) comes with a risk that we (or I) perhaps don’t fully appreciate
- The world would fall apart if Google went down
- I want to Tweet about Twitter being down
- Work is quieter (I spend too much time PC or laptop-bound)
- Writing a blog post about it just isn’t immediate enough
- Sod’s law states that your own site will be up and down at the same time
- Although you can live blog quite easily in WordPress
- Writing a blog post about it may get some exposure
- I’ve lost some form of (however vicarious) contact with quite a few people I like to read about
- Checking out spam followers is not something I miss
- What’s the fall out going to be? Millions of blog posts, a Newsnight report, lead on the main news…Lots of high-profile people and organisations are using Twitter
- Some people like specualting that, like, the whole internet is under attack
- Twitter is an awesome service
- Maybe we’ll start paying for Twitter (but isn’t this a technical rather than a financial issue – I don’t think Twitter is short of a few bob)
Still down…
Tweet me when it’s back up.