Twitter was down… where are your communication eggs?

Its been a difficult few days for Twitter the social not-working site

Over the last few days it has now been down for several hours each day and the BBC and other are reporting that it is due to the site being spammed and causing a denial of service – this means that a co=ordinated attack has taken place to take the site ‘off the air’.

In addition, Twitter has had to take their API service down – this means that when Twitter is ‘up’ it is only available to a limited number of services, and peoples usual access patterns are disturbed. This should be resolved in a few days.

Now while this is an inconvenience and it may have been done to orchestrate a ‘news blackout’ or just to show the ‘power’ some have over the web it does raise some interesting opportunities… Political motivated actions can have world wide impacts on sensitive communication channels like Twitter.

It will be interesting to see if productivity increased over the last two days in the business world.

Several sites have published lists about what to do now twitter is down – I like this one from techcrunch

• Talk about Twitter being down on FriendFeed
• Talk about Twitter being down on Facebook
• Talk about Twitter being down over IM
• Leave a comment on a blog post about Twitter being down (preferably this one)
• Talk about Twitter being down via text message
• Talk about Twitter being down over email
• Tip TechCrunch that Twitter is down
• Write your own blog post about Twitter being down (for an example, see this blog post)
• Talk about Twitter being down on Plurk
• Talk about Twitter being down on Identi.ca
• Talk about Twitter being down internally on Yammer
• Think about Twitter being down
• Call an actual friend to talk about Twitter being down
• Invite an actual friend over to talk about Twitter being down
• Go outside

or maybe.. just maybe… do some work…. decisions decisions

Are all your communication eggs in one basket?

On a more serious note, it prompted me to look at alternatives – identi.ca and friendfeed as parallel channels for marketing and communications. I have had the identica account for some time and push all my blog posts out this way – Yesterday I registered on Friendfeed and will be doing the same.

One thing that the last few days has taught me is not to put all my eggs in one basket. and over the next couple of weeks I will be looking at how to leverage these channels together effectively.