That error page is about as useful as Twitter is.
But seriously, if you spend a great deal of time obsessing over what you friends are doing and keeping them updated on the status of your day-to-day life, you don’t need a better error page. Your message of “Going to the ATM” or “Updating my Facebook picture” just won’t get out to the rest of the world.
And is that such a bad thing?
No, you all got it totally wrong. If it can send you a cute picture, it hasn’t REALLY crashed, get it? A real no-nonsense hardcore crash means BLAM! your browser vanishes!
The only time I notice is the little dots at the bottom right of Twitterific. I’m only following a couple of people and there are only a couple of people following me, so it’s not big deal and I don’t pay for it either. But seriously, how do the Twitter people make money? The only way I can see is via sms text messages.
Joel did a good post about this a while back when their fogbugz on demand server went down. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/01/22.html
Jeff,
One downtime was scheduled today (the one that occured May 20 2008 at 1700H @ GMT+8) – Twitter had a small inconspicuous text box speaking of a scheduled 2 hour downtime on their page, but once they went down they didn’t carry over the downtime notification message to that generic “technical difficulties” page.
I feel that, if only they carry over that message appropriately, their responsibility would be fulfilled.
[quote]The thing is, this downtime was scheduled wasnt it?! I did get a flash of a warning on the web saying that it would be down for an hour or so for maintenence…
Put simply, if they had a page up saying “down for maintence” wouldnt that be a whole lot more positive than “technically wrong”?
[/quote]
There’s two sides to this coin… some public servers I use tell you (proudly) that it’s down for maintennance whenever the server stops responding - including long query results!
You missed a few other important things users should be told in a service error message:
Did what I just tried, work? (Did my e-mail send? Purchase go through? Changes commit? Pictures post? Blog update?)
Do I have to do it again?
Should I try again right now, or later? How much later?
Twitter - is that thing still around?
No offense, but anyone who considers that to be an “essential service” has some serious organizational problems. That’s worse than the people gasping for air and flailing about wildly when they can’t get to MSN messenger or Facebook.
I know that’s not really on topic, but I think it would have been a more effective delivery if you’d left out that bit.
Twitter - An “essential service”?
Please… an essential service is a service that without which one could to a degree not live without.
If the police or firefighters or EMT, were to strike or in context to this discussion (crash, downtime), it would not matter whether they gave warning or not; the chaos that results would be the same. Any removal of their services at any time in any way would be disastrous.
That is what makes a service essential. Twitter – is definitely not.
Is Twitter down for everyone, or just me? Is there a place I can go to check Twitter’s current system health?
Funny thing was just about to post a comment about istwitterdown.com when I noticed that it was down now sigh
if twitter is becoming so critical for users, I’m sure they could charge for it. In fact, given their current technical woes they could be in the dangerous position of pricing themselves out of business, instead of pricing themselves out of the market. I don’t know what business model they would use, perhaps unlimited tweets from the web, but only 10 tweets per day from the API? Then again I could be wrong. One day Google seemed to only get money in by selling a few search appliances, the next it was the world’s biggest advertising platform and a license to print money.
And Broham, touching screens (except the iPhone) is a legitimate subject to blog about. I’m not cold-hearted enough to want to make it a crime punishable by jail, or being poked randomly with sticks covered in lard, but screen-touchers need to know they are not normal.
just had a thought. must read the twitter terms of service and privacy policy. wouldn’t want them to be making money from selling my tweets…