Was-Twitter-downed-by-Bill-Gates-by-Haiti-or-by-passing-whales?
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Twitter has been down this morning, which always gets addicts asking themselves two important questions: Whose fault is it? and How long does Twitter have to be down before it prompts a blogpost? (People smarter than me probably have a pre-written story so they can blog it before Twitter comes back up.)
The latest extended outage cast suspicion on Twitter newbie Bill Gates, characterised in last night's blog post as pulling in users like a black hole. But that seems a little unlikely, if only because the idea has been punted by the Daily Telegraph.
Twitter survived the arrival of Oprah, tweeting live on her TV show, and no Seattle nerd not even Seattle's richest nerd has Oprah's mass-market pulling power. (See my graph.)
Another theory was suggested in comments to TechCrunch's Twitter-is-down story, and posted by John Carnell at TechnicaVita. He wrote:
The last big event around 1 minute before the site failed was that an aftershock in Haiti measuring 6.1 had just struck. I think we might have just seen Twitter overloaded as that single fact was retweeted across the network.
Meanwhile, Twitter itself resorted to blaming innocent marine life*, as usual. Its status update said, simply:
We are experiencing an outage due to an extremely high number of whales. Our on-call team is working on a fix.
Will we ever know the answer? If so, will anyone care?
The problem is that when Twitter is down, there's not much for some folk to do except write Twitter-is-down blog posts. However, Twitter being down means that there's no way to tweet those Twitter-is-down blog posts, and thus reach the only audience that gives a hoot. Not you, obv.
* See The Story of/> [...]
Thu Jan 21, 2010 14:20 pm
A Customer Aware World
In an article about Google’s Approach to Social, Liz Gannes at GigaOm quoted David Glazer, director of engineering, as saying: “Everything is better when it knows who I am,” said Glazer, who is responsible for working on developer platforms that include social aspects[.]
Google’s new approach to social media:
“Who I am, who do I know, what do I do,” said Glazer.
You can read the article for more context, but I want to take it somewhere different.
Does your company know who you are? Do they know who you know? Do they know what you do? Maybe. Probably. Somewhat.
Does your company know who your customers are? (yes) Do they know who your customers know? (sometimes) Do they know what your customers do? (not as sure)
People expect a certain level of customer service as table stakes to the game. In the new, much more wired world, I believe we’re asking for more. I want my airlines to know just how often I fly, which seat I tend to choose, how often I upgrade, and whether I normally check my bag. Think about how helpful they could be if they did something with that information.
As we move into another year of social, where location and mobile is playing much more a role, I think people will want the companies who serve them to know we’re there (checking in with Foursquare would tell them this), who in the company interacts with them and in what ways. Imagine Best Buy knowing that [...]
Tue Jan 12, 2010 03:55 am
Your Midyear Startup Checkup: Are You On Target?
2010 is over half over, which makes it a good time to reflect on the year so far and revise your startup's plans - if necessary, of course - for the year ahead. Are you on target? Have your targets changed? And if so, have you adjusted course to compensate?
Mark MacLeod posted his thoughts on the midyear point on the Startup CFO blog today, noting that it can be difficult for startups to establish accurate targets. Even so, he notes, there are two schools of thoughts when it comes to targets. The first: you set the targets, now stick with them. The second: if you can't meet the targets, it only makes sense to adjust.
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If you've determined that, indeed, your targets need adjusting, MacLeod suggests the following:
Diagnose: "Hold a post mortem," he writes, "ideally involving much or all of your team." What went wrong? Were the targets unreasonable? If so, why were they set in the first place? If the targets were reasonable, why weren't they attained? What can be done about that?
Reset: Now that you have new insights into your performance, you can set new targets - making sure that your investors support them, of course.
Communicate: After you've reviewed your year-to-date performance, make sure you share that diagnosis with your whole team. Explain not only what the new targets are, but why the targets are changing.
Partial Mulligan: If employees' compensation is tied to meeting targets, MacLeod argues that "resetting targets should not be the equivalent of a Mulligan. You need to retain some incentive to hit the new targets, but unless/> [...]
Wed Jul 07, 2010 14:25 pm
Google Brings Drug Info to Search Results
If there's anything that a recent ear ache taught me, it's that searching for answers on the Internet can be a trying task at times. The world is full of people - all of them doctors in their own mind - and the Internet is a wonderful representation of all their opinions.
While we love this fact when it comes to political discourse and daily musings, health and medicine are a different game, which is why we're sure to appreciate Google's latest offering - medication listings in search results.
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As Greg Sterling writes, Google first "began integrating structured health-related content at the top of search results" last year as a way to provide authoritative and reliable answers to health-related searches.
That same functionality is expanding today to searches for both name brand and generic medications, with the result summarly linking to information as provided by the National Institutes of Health.
The summary, which is offered at the top of the search results, offers a quick summary of the drug along with quick links to commonly-sought information such as side effects, precautions, dietary instructions and how to take it. According to Sterling, the feature is currently only available in the U.S. and Google declined to say whether or not it would expand to other countries.
[...]
Tue Jun 22, 2010 08:35 am
