I swear, the way people panic when it drops off, Twitter is way more like a protocol than a website. It's like someone saying "Email is broken... Everywhere".
We've reached a dangerous point. Everybody in the world joining the internet combined with a lack of knowledge about how things work means the unwashed masses gravitate towards centralized services. Instead of building distributed competitive services on top of a distributed fault-tolerant bi-directional network, we have rampant mass centralization. Protocols and interoperability are dead.
We can now almost legitimately say "The Internet is down!" when AWS goes tits up. People can't get news from their favorite boy bands when mysql hoses twitter (for the 7,000th time).
I think Twitter is more like a protocol than a website; and frankly it's too important at this point to be left in the hands of Twitter Inc. I'd love to see a serious discussion about making it a community-owned standard on the same level with TCP/IP or SMTP. But I guess that could never happen in a free-enterprise-obsessed world -- unless, perhaps, Twitter proved itself to be such a bad steward that its users demanded some kind of "nationalization."
> I think Twitter is more like a protocol than a website; and frankly it's too important at this point to be left in the hands of Twitter Inc.
Yeah, what we really need is the same people who run the Department of Motor Vehicles and the Post Office to take it away from the filthy profit-seekers who created it.
I'm just having fun! And dealing with my own PANIC in my own way.
Seriously though, think how dependent a lot of people are on Twitter. I'm not just talking about us nerds who like tweeting links about CSS hacks, or the people who like to take photos of their food.
Here in the UK train companies use it to put out information on service status. News networks use it as their primary means of connecting with the audience. Hell, I have several friends who seem to conduct their entire relationship via Twitter. It's also become the go-to method of communication for people who want to get a message to companies.
Whether or not this is overkill, that's for individuals to decide. But I'm 100% sure that Twitter has outgrown itself.
Because these pages tend to be highly curated and manually updated; they don't actually give a live perspective of actual service outages. If they were actual automated status pages, we'd learn how often a service really does go down for 2-3 minutes at a time while no one really notices.
I don't think there should be a HN submission every time Twitter/Google Talk/AWS has a short outage and I find this submission in particular to be of low value - that's why I flagged it.
