There was a ComputerWorld post that talked about the issues with Twitter's downtime recently. A few companies who have dedicated clients and features that are dependent upon Twitter are whining about the downtime.
Sorry folks, no empathy here. You built an entire company upon another free service that is a single point of failure for your clients? And you want me to feel sorry for you? (Insert time-out buzzer sound here)
Seesmic is one of those platforms. I used to love Seesmic and was a heavy user of their video application. They even threw me some cash for developing the first WordPress plugin. Now Seesmic video has been demoted to a link in their footer, and these Twitter-dependent products have been given the spotlight.
I'd love to Seesmic return to it's originality and develop Seesmic as a Twitpic style video service for Twitter, with integration directly into the Seesmic apps. It doesn't appear, after a year, that's ever going to happen, though. Instead, they're just chasing Twitter Apps... with a company that's now releasing their own applications.
Twitter isn't a protocol, like email, where anyone can build and distribute applications that use it independently. Twitter owns all of the communication. Twitter never promised uptime with its cost = free. Perhaps this is the problem with Twitter. What if Twitter had it's largest application providers and API users help in solving the dependency issues? Perhaps Twitter can develop their application to be distributed and if you're a heavy user - you have to contribute to the pool and hold up you're end of the bargain?
I wrote about a micro-blogging protocol a long-time ago and still think it's a valid solution. If they don't, someone else should develop an open protocol and solution that can withstand unlimited growth potential. Companies could invest in their own micro-blogging servers that could feed and integrate statuses to LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook... wherever they'd like.
And,ultimately, you would be responsible for your own uptime!
This post was written by Douglas Karr
Douglas Karr is the founder of The Marketing Technology Blog. Doug is President and CEO of DK New Media, an online marketing company specializing in social media, blogging and search engine optimization. Their clients include Webtrends, ChaCha and many more. Douglas is also the author of Corporate Blogging for Dummies. Follow him on Twitter @douglaskarr.