Twitter is like Teflon and I'm like a cow

The Irish word for Prime Minister is Taoiseach and we fondly refer to our three term current leader as the Teflon Taoiseach because criticism never sticks. It seems the man can get away with anything.

Kind of like Twitter really. As I type the phenomenally popular social networking service is yet again unavailable this morning. That follows a 14 hour outage only a day ago. We keep tabs on this type of thing over on Jaiku you see. Which is about all we do on Jaiku!

Actually that's an unfair exaggeration - Jaiku has a very useful Channels feature which we use to organize OpenCoffee Clubs, Podcamps and Barcamps. But outside of those channels there's relatively little activity, at least among my social circle. You'd be forgiven for thinking a week of regular Twitter outages might change that. But no, Twitter is like Teflon. Regardless of how often it goes down it's reputation remains unsullied. Whinge and whine all we want but as soon as the gates of the promised pasture re-open we follow the herd back into Twitterland. Mooooo!

Comments

[Damien Mulley]

The social and communication bits in our DNA make us seek out larger crowds to interact with, without going over the Dunbar number. This is why humans will forgive outages once it doesn't disrupt the flow too much and why they will stay with inferior services like Twitter when better services like Jaiku exist. Twitter is just very lucky and their luck is holding right now, but if Jaiku gets a certain percentage of the big names to migrate over to them, then Twitter will wither and die.

I wouldn't consider the notion of herd-following to be accurate as it is more to do with maximising our network, which is a little bit more intelligent than mooing.

[Chris Byrne]

I worry when someone on my network twitted me last week that they are buying coffee now and it's raining again. I know this guy is in sales and should be selling not telling. So twitless I remain.

[liam noonan]

I suppose the fact that its not seen as an essential tool means that there is lower expectation of uptime and availability.

I really like Jaiku for its threading and ability to delete. But Twitter in some ways is closer to SMS, if we become more reliant upon it we will then demand real time service

[NiaLLLarkin]

Its an interesting phenomenon to observe. I was amazing to see jaiku like ghost town once twitter came back up the other day. Many people left mid-conversation and continued on their conversations in the twitter. Its undeniable that there are herd dynamics in operation. Though, it'd be a mistake to consider herd behaviour as unintelligent though. Its a different kind of intelligence to rational intelligence. Sometimes inferior. Sometimes superior. And our actions as a group will be guided to a greater or lessor degree by both.