It has taken a long time for me to become a convert to Twitter but three examples in the last few days have shown me how powerful it is.
1) Suppliers on Twitter
Our web site went down. The nameservers were not reachable and the supplier Dotster.com had no error messages on its status board. Its ticket system was also down
Searching for Dotster on Twitter quickly showed that many other people were having the same problem and that Dotster had an active twitter account. I was able to report the problem via twitter and Dotster was able to update me when the system was fixed.
2) Nokia N97 Lens Scratch
I was really looking forward to getting a Nokia N97 but needed more information on its voip capability and some reported design faults that create lens scratches. Googling these problems, especially the voip one, brought up loads of waffling dated posts whereas searching on Twitter brought up some excellent links that allowed me to make an informed decision to wait a while.
Why were the twitter links more useful than google – 2 things – they were recent and they were concise
3) The Notes community and help for Xpages
I am very concious of not wanting to over do this one but on a couple of occasions after banging my head against a wall for some time I have asked about a problem on Twitter and got some really good help about this new technology – it is also great to leave a search on “xpages” running in tweetdeck and watch stuff as it comes up.
So why did it take me so long to try Twitter ? Well I thought it would be a real distraction and I thought that everyone would be posting lots – the truth is that some people post lots ( and I mean lots Bruce ) and some hardly post at all, there seem to be very few that post an average amount ( I guess that should be median amount). If you are not on Twitter get yourself on and post as much or as little as you want – I tend to be a voyeur more than a poster but no-one minds.
And the downside ? Just my inclination to want to rant – it is very tempting when DDE crashes but hopefully that won’t happen too much ( the ranting I mean, the DDE bit is too much to hope for just now – see I’m doing it again ! ).