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when Twitter goes down, it takes everyone with it. At which point everyone switches to Facebook, or email, or Blogspot, or direct SMS, or HN at the same time s
by mechanical_fish 17y ago
when Twitter goes down, it takes everyone with it.
At which point everyone switches to Facebook, or email, or Blogspot, or direct SMS, or HN at the same time so that they can discuss the Twitter outage with their friends.
We're not designing TCP/IP. We're not building the 911 emergency system. Your social network does not have to survive a nuclear attack. There are many alternative channels at Twitter's layer of the network.
Meanwhile, there is an all-important flip side: When Twitter is up, it is generally up for everyone. (To the point where, when this isn't true, people start writing essays complaining about the unreliability of Twitter. As if a network of a thousand thousand individually-managed RSS feeds would be any more reliable.)