Microblogging (see: Twitter) Needs to Be Decentralized and Reliable

This morning I woke up to find that Twitter was down. They tell you in a really cute way, with a little "fail whale" - it's so sweet. But why is this lack of reliability tolerated by governments, large corporations, emergency workers, and other serious people?

Mashable.com reports that the best theory for the downtime was a deluge of tweets caused by a second Haiti earthquake. A second earthquake in Haiti? No offense to Haiti, that is a horrible situation, but imagine if we had a really, really serious situation (say, the Pentagon the Golden Gate Bridge get hit by drones controlled by terrorists) - could you rely on Twitter?

I'm still surprised that no serious competitor to Twitter has arisen. Sure, someone like Google or Microsoft or others could just buy it, but they'd at present be purchasing an unreliable product with questionable customer service and a cute children's language and a steep learning curve.

Where's the competitive product for 50 year old insurance salesmen? For UN relief workers?

Sure, Twitter could improve. I use it. I don't really want to see them fail. But if, as they claim, they want to make it "communications infrastructure" (a lofty goal to think they will be the next AT&T), then it needs to be decentralized and partially redundant. Email doesn't just "go down" and neither does RSS. People like Dave Winer can write much better about this than I can, but here's one brief post by entrepreneur Andrew Baron about decentralizing Twitter for you.

Two years ago, when I first started using Twitter to study its use for the government, I thought that it was a great new tool which was potentially useful for unified communications in a crisis. Two years later, little has changed. It's useful when it works.

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Comments (1)

Jan 21, 2010
clarke thomas said...
comes down to costs & SLAs. SM networks are not built with SLA in mind, they're built on attracting users & providing mesh for them to connect. Companies should not rely on them (like relying on Skype) for primary communication, they're an added media outlet but not a reliable one.

I've been wondering from the start, how Twitter was going to make money?

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About

Dr. Mark Drapeau is a biological scientist, government and private-sector consultant, and prolific writer on science, technology, innovation, government, and society. He recently joined Microsoft's U.S. Public Sector division as Director of Innovative Social Engagement. He is also an adjunct faculty member in the School of Media and Public Affairs at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and until recently he held the position of Associate Research Fellow at the Center for Technology and National Security Policy at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C. Mark is currently a regular writer for Washington Life, Federal Computer Week, and numerous high-profile blogs. He is a co-founder of Government 2.0 Club and is the co-chair of the O'Reilly Media / TechWeb-produced Gov 2.0 Expo. Mark has a B.S. and Ph.D. in biology and has held postdoctoral fellowships from the NIH and AAAS. His research has considered many topics, from the origin of insect behavioral instincts to the honeybee genome to government operations during pandemic flu to the uses of biological metaphors in national security.