cruel and unusual
January 15, 2008
Twitter goes down just as Stevenote starts. Jaiku also afflicted. Fanboys everywhere are sad, sad, sad.
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More thoughts on this. Some people have talked about the usefulness of Twitter in real time crises where information needs to be disseminated quickly. On a small scale, I’m sure it would work. By small scale, I mean a couple hundred users in a small city like, say, Ann Arbor. But the fact that it completely choked today – albeit in a major stress test of users across the country – does not bode well for it functioning as a back-channel in emergent situations of a larger scale. (Earthquake in a major city, or something like that?)
I don’t think anyone took the time to study the use of the Internet in communication during Katrina. The thought that we’ll rely on Twitter is very silly. The Internet was out to lunch for most of early September. Email especially.
Actually, Twitter fancies itself a communications tool for emergent situations of all kinds: http://blog.twitter.com/2008/01/why-we-are-focused-on-engineering-and.html
Don’t forget that Twitter is accessible through text messaging. Yes, of course, internet would be down in a major disaster, but cell phone communications might remain available, depending on the circumstances. And text messages do not clog cell phone communications the way voice calls do – a lot more can be carried. So it is conceivable that Twitter might be used under disastrous circumstances, if it gets its backend service figured out properly.