Twitter down. Friendfeed down. Where did you go?

Written on 9th May 2009                                                                                                              6 COMMENTS
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.

Twitter went down today, this time round it was scheduled and the plan was to be back up and running an hour later. Sure enough, Twitter was up an hour later but down a few moments after and still is at the time of writing.

Friendfeed, my usual first choice, but most peoples Twitter alternative then decided to go down and quite possibly the most inappropriate time. MG Siegler over at TechCrunch discovered via Friendfeed co-founder Bret Taylor that the site has lose contact with its data center.

The question is, what are the serious alternatives for all the tech heads out there? Facebook is one I suppose, but just never attracts me unless I’m looking to catch up with offline friends. Plurk is another alternative but sadly people seem to have abandoned the site. Identi.ca? Flickr I guess? What ever happened to Virb?

image courtesy of TastyBlogSnack

downtime, friendfeed, twitter

6 Comments »

Google Reacts to Downtime with Status Dashboard for Google Apps Users

Written on 26th February 2009                                                                                                              3 COMMENTS
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.

After the news of Gmail’s downtime, Google have taken steps to ensuring business and individuals using their Google Apps platform are kept updated as to any possible issues by creating the Google Apps Status Dashboard.

The dashboard gives you a run down of all of  the Google App services and an update as to their status. As Jason Kincaid at Techcrunch highlights, this follows suit with other services such as Twitter who also have their own Twitter Status blog run on Tumblr.

It’s to Google’s credit that they react so swiftly to issues which could detrimentally affect the company’s reputation. In doing so, they are viewed as proactive, in tune and ever aware of their customers fears and concerns…impressive.

More info on the Google Enterprise blog if you’re interested.

downtime, google, google apps, status

3 Comments »

Twiddict: methadon for Twitter addicts

Written on 9th June 2008                                                                                                              3 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

@robinwauters, @tomklaasen, @tijs, and @atog are Twitter addicts. So every time there’s “something technically wrong” on their beloved microblogging service, their world crashes into them. Basically a cold turkey is awaiting these guys every single damn day, over and over again. They HAD to find a solution, as their dealers Evan Williams and Biz Stone haven’t proved to be very helpful so far. So they used the last strength in their Twitter-tortured bodies to find a way to cope with this destructive life style. Well, in the end, these junkies found one and – self-conscious as they are – called it Twiddict.

One of the addicts used a probably stolen laptop to email me some background about Twiddict:

The way it works, is pretty straightforward: users can log in to their Twitter account and use Twiddict to keep sending their messages as they are used to. Twiddict then continuously pings the Twitter API to see if it’s up again, and routes the stored messages back as soon as it’s stable.

To see it in action, go to Twiddict and log in with your Twitter account details. Don’t worry, these guys are “maniacally protective of users’ data”. Sure, like you take an addict’s word for granted.

downtime, Robin Wauters, twiddict, twitter

3 Comments »