Using twitter as an outage notification

[martin at airwire.ie (Martin List-Petersen)]

Aleksandr Milewski wrote:
> On 7/4/09 7:50 AM, Roland Perry wrote:
> 
>> What I'm trying to anticipate is the objection to *also* posting to
>> Twitter, which might be raised on the grounds that it's too
>> "unofficial", or "unsupported" or something like that.
> 
> Anecdotal, of course, but I found twitter to be very useful during the
> SF Bay Area fiber cuts a few months back. I was able to fairly quickly
> get reports of who was down (UnitedLayer) and who wasn't (everyone
> else), and made some good contacts, some of whom I've done business with
> since (Cernio).
> 
> Set up a twitter account for outage/event notifications, and don't
> *ever* use it for marketing.
> 

I'd agree on this one.

We use it for outage/event/coverage expansion notifications.

Originally, we thought a blog style website somewhere outside our
network was the way to go, but twitter has so many more angles, like RSS
feed capability, an API to integrate it somewhere on your website and
mobile clients.
On top of that, you can update it via SMS if needed.

The hype some people are pushing twitter on, I can't follow, but for
those type of notifications, it's perfect, also because it's not part of
your own infrastructure.

Kind regards,
Martin List-Petersen
-- 
Airwire - Ag Nascadh Pobail an Iarthair
http://www.airwire.ie
Phone: 091-865 968