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

[tme at americafree.tv (Marshall Eubanks)]

On Jul 4, 2009, at 6:17 AM, Roland Perry wrote:

> In article <786BA8C0-B534-40FF-9126-1E33BD11CB3C at americafree.tv>,  
> Marshall Eubanks <tme at 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 ?

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.

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

Marshall

> What does the team think?
>
> Paying a lot more to host the website with higher "burst" capacity  
> during an emergency, isn't an option.
>
> The only other idea I've had is to sign all the customers up to  
> receive an SMS via some sort of broadcast service (the news will fit  
> easily in one SMS).
> -- 
> Roland Perry
>
>

Regards
Marshall Eubanks
CEO / AmericaFree.TV