Friday, May 29, 2009

You know this, but your Mom doesn't


What's great about Twitter..
I've been using Twitter for a few months now and I like it. To me, twitter is like a crowd of people all talking around me. The crowd is always exactly the right mix of information and humor because I invited all of them. I hear snippets of conversations from all around me and I pick out the most relevant ones I wish to hear more about. It's also a great way to keep up with the most recent news about a new subject like cloud computing. The personal marketing opportunities are still great as twitter is still on a growing curve.

Twediquette:
Everyone I follow has been invited to my party. There is a certain etiquette that I expect of people who are in or can be invited to my party. Here's a quick list:
  1. Don't tweet hello. I know who you are. I know you are out there. Tell me something useful.
  2. Tell me something useful. You just got back from lunch is not useful to me. You just got back from lunch and would like to recommend your favorite dish is useful.
  3. Don't tweet too often. Filling up my screen with messages forces me to sift for the good stuff. Less is more.
  4. No Bodily functions. Nothing more to say about that.
Twitter improvements:
There are a few things I don't like about twitter. Please cache my address book and alert me when my contacts join twitter. I do this every couple of weeks to see who on my contact list has joined in, but LinkedIn does it for me automatically. Oh, and how about an auto-refresh option. Sometimes I leave Twitter open on a tab and realize, "What for?" I have to refresh the page anyway, might as well kill it and go back later.

Twitter cloud application:
If you've ever seen the 2D image of the sculpture above, then you know the fail whale. The fail whale appears when too many tweets overcome the twitter environment and the servers have difficulty keeping up with requests. I haven't seen it too often, but when it does appear hitting the refresh key usually provides immediate results. It did cause me to read the status bar and pay attention to where the hold-up was taking place. I was surprised to see AWS was the last request. So, twitter is using the power of elastic cloud computing to run this social network. Little or no capital investment in hardware necessary to run this popular service. Here's the kicker though, you don't care. All these terms (cloud, elastic, utility computing, etc..) are marketing terms that businesses use to speak to other businesses about IT. The end user (in or out of a business setting) just doesn't care how the service is delivered, they just want it to work. Speaking to most users about the cloud is like explaining how the electrical grid works. It's a utility and most people only care that when they hit the switch, the light comes on and who to call if it doesn't. Does the power you are using right now to read this come from hydro, coal, or nuclear? Can you even find out?

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