Twitter

Yes folks, Twitter is down. Take this opportunity to clean out your email, clean your hard drive, take a walk or check out one of our great sponsors. From what we can tell, Twitter has been down for approximately thirty minutes as of the time of this post. We've received a variety of emails also noting the same. Our man in Switzerland says he is also unable to access the site.

Earlier this year we highlighted 10 excellent ideas on how to use the time when Twitter is down.

The question no one seems to be addressing is what happens to the apps that are built on top of Twitter? This morning we profiled Summize and their conversational search that uses Twitter. So for now, people can search but that's about it - the "real-time" index won't be updated until the service returns. How does this affect their income potential? What about all of the hundreds of other Twitter apps?

Is Twitter down where you are? If so, how are you using the time?

Update 7:34 PM Eastern: Twitter was partially up for a moment.

Update: 8:19PM Eastern: Twitter remains out of service - no update has been provided on the Twitter blog.

Update 8:48PM Eastern: From Chris Anthony: We have an update from Alex Payne via the Twitter Development group on Google:

"I can confirm that we have been down for some time due to a massive unexpected cache invalidation. We're working to bring the site back up, although some features will be limited until caches have repopulated."

Update: 9:15pm Eastern: Twitter is back with limited functionality

Wayne Sutton has created the "What Is Twitter in 140 Seconds" contest. The idea is to create a video library of Twitter users who answer the question, "What is Twitter?" There's a variety of prizes including an iPhone and an iPod. You have until June 23, 2008 to enter. Here are the rules:

1. Create video
2. Video must be less than 140 secs.
3. Video must be tagged: whatistwitter
4. Submit video via form or hosting site.
5. Tweet #whatistwitter along with video url

The super big news this afternoon is that MySpace has joined the DataPortability movement in a big way. Here's all you need to know about this announcement:

1. some of the data (photos, videos, text) stored on MySpace will be available to their friend networks which include: Yahoo!, eBay, Twitter, and Photobucket.

2. it's not really data portability, more like data sharing

3. it's live data sharing -- if you change your status from male to female, it's instantly zapped to all of the places you've shared the info. This is awesome because it makes it easier than having to remember to change it in a million social networks.

4. They will accept Facebook into their data sharing plan but Zucks gotta be the one to make the call.

SAI has notes from the live conference call and Venture Beat has detailed analysis of the announcement. Check out all of our DataPortability coverage.

Chris Saad, data portability leader sent over the following video that explains the companies that have signed up to push info in and those who have signed up to suck info out.

Website monitoring company Pingdom is out with their downtime study for the top social networks for the first four months of 2008. Guess who leads with the most downtime? If you guessed Twitter, you win the prize! Pingdom reports that Twitter has been down over 37 hours in the past four months. Coming up right behind Twitter is the service that wants to go to Prom but has no date, Pownce. Pownce claims an exciting 13+ hours of downtime.

Big player networks MySpace and Facebook came in with 1 and 2 hours of downtime respectively. Now this makes sense, Twitter and Pownce are new and while it seems to the 250 that Twitter has been around forever, they haven't. Part of their downtime is caused by maintenance and upgrades. Larger networks such as MySpace and Facebook have huge valuations which allow them to have the server capacity and production environments that don't require downtime for changes.

These screenshots are taken from Radian6, social media monitoring application that I've been using for the past couple of days.

This screen shows topical clouds taken from twitter accounts of several social media influencers. Shown here are Tara Hunt (missrogue), Chris Brogan, Adrian Chan (gravity7 -- the parser apparently doesn't like alphanumerical names), Dave Winer, Stowe Boyd, Michael Arrington, Chris Heuer, Jeremiah Owyang, and Brian Solis.

(note I worked myself in there? crafty eh? I'm not really an influencer, of course, so I put myself in there as a proxy control group.)

You'll need to hit each of these and pop them to full size to be able to read them. If you do, you'll probably wonder as I did what, if anything, this tells us. These are cloud views, and could be provided by tweetclouds, but I found it handy to be able to lay them side by side, and to be able to flip each window over and change parameters (eg. date range). And they're updated in real time, so they refresh every few minutes or so. MORE »

It seems today you can't turn to any tech blog without numerous mentions of Twitter. There are so many other great startups out there that aren't Twitter-related that have been overlooked because of this apparent train that everyone's on headed for Twitterville. To that end, I've declared Twitter-free week on CenterNetworks. There will be no Twitter posts this week. This includes Twitter and clients of Twitter. If Twitter is acquired by Google for the estimated $2 billion this week, you will need to look elsewhere! Instead we will focus on looking at other startups and trends.

I still enjoy using Twitter and will continue to use it this week. Let's all take a Twitter posting holiday and find new things to be excited about and open our minds for intriguing discussions. Medics will be available and on-call for any of those with Twitter-post-withdrawls (e.g. Marshall, Mike, Adam, Louis, etc.)

Would you like to join CN this week? It's easy. Save the image on the right (or copy the code below), place it on your blog, link to this post and leave a comment (or mail me) with your blog info. I will add your link to this post.

Let's get it on! Code to copy:

<a href="http://www.centernetworks.com/centernetworks-declares-twitter-free-week"><img src="http://media.centernetworks.com/images/twitterfree.png" title="Twitter Free Week" border="0" /></a>

CrowdStatus allows you to create live groups of people you follow on Twitter. Josh at Webware has an indepth review of CrowdStatus from earlier this month. I've asked for this type of functionality before - the ability to follow different groups of people for different things. For example, on the mobile, I'd like only x and y sent but on the Web client, I'd like everything.

Below is an screenshot example of a crowd created on CrowdStatus for the ReadWriteWeb gang. Here's another one for the CNET gang. It'd be great if you could grab a crowd widget.

I spoke with creator Darrent Stuart who shared two major updates for the application launched yesterday. The first one is to use CrowdStatus as your Twitter application. Rather than going to Twitter, you can send updates inside of CrowdStatus. To set up the updates, add your Twitter login info to your account.

The other update is the ability to create crowds of protected followers. By providing CrowdStatus with your Twitter credentials, CrowdStatus can create crowds of people you follow that are not public.

If you've created a crowd, post a link in the comments - would be interesting to see a variety of crowds.

Swiss startup Sobees has updated their application called bTT today. bTT combines Twitter and FriendFeed together and is similar to AlertThingy (our review). bTT works on Windows machines only currently. Check out our review of the full Sobees app from SXSW.

The new features include:

• Friendfeed and Twitter in one flow (no duplicates)
• New design (other sobees designs will be integrated later)
• Window sizing
• Comments now directly integrated in the main flow
• Option to show/hide all comments
• Option to post on Twitter and FriendFeed
• Filter by service
• Font size options
• Pictures displayed as a slide show within the flow

Here's an example of the app in action:

The aggregation space of sharing/microblogging services sure seems to be sizzling hot right now!

In my ongoing binge to ferret out the social mechanics of twitter third party sites and tools, hashtags deserves attention. Here's a basic example of hashtags. It's small, and by all appearances might die on the vine, which would be sad. But if the great culling whose season draws near were to remove hashtags from the social media dna pool, it would be for reasons owing less to the operationaI think and more to fundamental problems with the user experience.

Hashtags make a big demand on the twitterer. They ask that she tag up posts while writing, which requires a) added effort, b) a pause to reflect on meta while composing, c) a sense of the benefit provided to folks who search by tag in the future. (A) and (b) pull the user out of the immediacy of twittering -- not much, but maybe enough to matter.

I remember working with a startup that was into the idea of tagging up chats for better discovery -- of like-minded chatters and of topically-related chats. I thought the idea was great, especially because chats aren't logged, and in theory at least the promise of social web is to connect people around what they talk about (in common). But to get meta from talk requires either automation or a change of user behavior. Either sites and services mine talk for the meta, and build links and suggestions of topics and talkers, or the user declares meta while talking (or just after, as in tagging). MORE »

Early this morning Orli Yakuel who runs the Go2Web20 startup directory had all of her direct messages (aka private messages) on Twitter exposed to her 600+ followers. Michael Arrington has a good recap of the issue on Techcrunch. The instant that I read about this trouble I thought it could be one of the large number of third-party apps built on Twitter's API. Arrington has since updated his recap to note that it looks like it was a third-party app, GroupTweet that caused the direct messages to be shown to the public.

In this case, everyone seemed to immediately blame Twitter for the issue. As more platforms (Twitter is a platform) launch and more applications are built on top (e.g. Twhirl, FriendFeed, GroupTweet, etc.), we will need to determine methods and techniques to determine when the issues are with the platform and when they are with the application. By default, that isn't an easy proposition.

Furthering the issue and making it more complex is the issue of installation and updates. For example, you install x app to work with Twitter today. You read the terms and are satisfied so you install. A couple of weeks go by and you are bored with it so you leave and move on to the next one. When the first app updates, you may get hit with the updates and not even remember that you installed the first app and blame the issue on the second app or the platform. See how complicated this can get? Where's Columbo when you need him!

Here's a startup idea: a tracker for Web apps that you've installed and their current status (installed, active, not active, deleted, etc.)

Of course with all of the issues Twitter has faced, I can see why the immediate blame went to them.