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May 20

Using downtime for publicity

Comic, Tech with tags: Add comments

Twitter downtime

Every other day you see a post like this or this.

I wonder if the downtime that Twitter has, may have been a good thing in some ways. It gets people riled up, and we all rant about how it is crucial that we have a Twitter that is up. But, it isn’t down enough to make people switch to Pownce, which doesn’t seem to go down (or at least you don’t hear about it) so it therefore doesn’t get in the news.

I wish we could have a parallel universe that could compare the growth of a service with zero downtime versus a touch of it, in this case.

9 Responses to “Using downtime for publicity”

  1. Dylan Says:

    Flickr was the master of this early on, with their “Flick is down for a massage”. They turned system down messages into something fun.

  2. Jason Carreira Says:

    Stockholm syndrome is a psychological response sometimes seen in an abducted hostage, in which the hostage shows signs of loyalty to the hostage-taker, regardless of the danger (or at least risk) in which the hostage has been placed. The syndrome is named after the Norrmalmstorg robbery of Kreditbanken at Norrmalmstorg, Stockholm, Sweden, in which the bank robbers held bank employees hostage from August 23 to August 28 in 1973. In this case, the victims became emotionally attached to their victimizers, and even defended their captors after they were freed from their six-day ordeal. The term Stockholm Syndrome was coined by the criminologist and psychiatrist Nils Bejerot, who assisted the police during the robbery, and referred to the syndrome in a news broadcast.

  3. Dan Shaw Says:

    I was wondering about this over the weekend as I was visiting Pownce after about a 3 month hiatus and thought it would be interesting to compare the traffic numbers since you never hear about Pownce having an outage.

    I tried compete.com and there’s NO comparison:
    http://siteanalytics.compete.com/twitter.com+pownce.com/

    It’s not RoR vs. Django, there’s just a huge difference in traffic. Plus, I’m pretty sure these numbers don’t account for API traffic which Al3x notes comprises most of Twitter’s traffic:
    http://www.slideshare.net/al3x/designing-your-api

  4. DarkRat Says:

    Wow, I can’t even say if the comment above is spam or not. It somehow fits the topic.

  5. Dan Shaw Says:

    @DarkRat Why would my comment be spam? It “fits the topic” because it’s a comment on the topic.

  6. Jason Says:

    @DarkRat, it’s not spam, it’s a commentary on Twitter users / apologists

  7. John Says:

    @twitter Bye. Now what will I do with all my regained free time?

  8. Dan Shaw Says:

    @John You could code a fully functional Jabber/XMPP client that really understood Twitter. IM is almost always rock solid even when the site is down or the API clients are flakey.

  9. Uttoran Sen Says:

    lol yeah, even downtime is good for a site like twitter which has crazy following, however on the users part, this is a totally bad user experience… but who cares…

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