Silence is Golden but Not on Twitter
Silence (or lack of communication) may be golden in some places and in some instances but not on the microblogging website and social networking service Twitter which experienced an outage on July 26, 2012 between 11:23 a.m. and 12:04 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time (EDT), only to crash again around 12:15 p.m. EDT. Most Twitter users were able to access the system around 1:30 p.m. EDT although some users along both coasts of North America were still experiencing accessibility problems.
Outages or slowness in service were reported in countries throughout North and South America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. Some Twitter users were still able to post updates through their mobile phones or by using third-party applications.
On the Twitter blog, Twitter’s Vice-President of Engineering, Mazen Rawashdeh, apologized for the outage which he attributed to the failure of two parallel data centers almost simultaneously rather than due to the start of the Olympics or a cascading bug. Mr. Rawashdeh committed Twitter's infrastructure team to improving the quality and stability of Twitter’s service.
Twitter has created a page for the 2012 Summer Olympics to cluster together tweets from Olympic athletes, coaches, and their families as well as those from sports reporters and announcers. Twitter and its 140 million users have experienced the second widespread outage over the last five weeks as Twitter has been gearing up to compete with Facebook for hosting online conversations relating to the 2012 Summer Olympics.
Toronto Public Library has produced a Twitter @ Your Fingertips tip sheet to assist users with the basics on how to use Twitter. Twitter’s Help Center also offers Twitter account holders information on the “basics” including one’s profile and account settings, finding and following people, tweets and messages, searching, features, linking to one’s blog or website, and best practices and guidelines. Also available on the Internet: Mashable offers The Beginner’s Guide to Twitter and ReadWriteWeb has A Beginner’s Guide to Twitter to help Twitter users.
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