So, here in the UK Twitter is back for me. It looks like I was without it for about 45 minutes. Call it an hour for a nice round figure.
Think about these two scenarios:
1. During that one hour you spend your time focussed on talking about this event as it's happening, speculating, having an emotional response (because you can't access something you want to and find a group of people experiencing the same thing and all get together to experience the frustration).
2. Tomorrow you read a story that says "Twitter was down for one hour yesterday" with some detail about what happened.
I believe that the latter is preferable. It's more efficient, less emotional and more useful. The former is the same as watching some 'Breaking News' event while is happening.
Now imagine that the one hour of downtime happened when you were asleep. You've missed nothing.
There are two scenarios where this news is important: if your business depends on Twitter, and if you are trying to assess the reliability of Twitter. The latter can be achieved by #2 above, only the former needs real-time updates and that doesn't mean general news reporting just your own monitoring.
Think about these two scenarios:
1. During that one hour you spend your time focussed on talking about this event as it's happening, speculating, having an emotional response (because you can't access something you want to and find a group of people experiencing the same thing and all get together to experience the frustration).
2. Tomorrow you read a story that says "Twitter was down for one hour yesterday" with some detail about what happened.
I believe that the latter is preferable. It's more efficient, less emotional and more useful. The former is the same as watching some 'Breaking News' event while is happening.
Now imagine that the one hour of downtime happened when you were asleep. You've missed nothing.
There are two scenarios where this news is important: if your business depends on Twitter, and if you are trying to assess the reliability of Twitter. The latter can be achieved by #2 above, only the former needs real-time updates and that doesn't mean general news reporting just your own monitoring.