Twitter Goes Down, World Ends

Twitter is fighting an “ongoing denial of service attack” today, and it highlights just how vital the service has become to those of us who use it. A friend asked me to get some bids for server-side development for a small real estate firm, and I was going to post that query on Twitter, knowing that my followers would get it to the right people. I needed to ask someone about a shared task that we were working on, and the only way I know how to reach him is Twitter. Now, that only happens to people who really engage with the service, but the fact remains that it happens to me, and friends of mine, a lot. So things are on hold while we wait for Twitter to get back up and running. And by “we” I do mean more than me. For more and more people, this sort of outage strikes at our productivity.

“Productivity?” you scoff, “It’s people sending little bits of ephemera to each other.” Well, yes, there’s definitely that. But it’s also increasingly a means of getting stuff done. The speed with which things are organized on Twitter is shocking. Status updates are rarely more than tweet-sized, particularly when everyone already knows the context. That means that work groups or teams can keep each other informed of progress on joint projects in real time and with minimal fuss. There are a lot of other applications and occasions for Twitter to be more than mere babble.

There’s a great bit at the beginning of “A Bug’s Life:” a leaf falls in front of an ant who is following the line of ants to the offering stone. He looks at it, trembles, and then screams “I’m LOST!!!” The scent trail has been obscured. I don’t mind admitting that I felt a little bit like that today.

All of this is informed by the larger context of all the new Cannes Lions content that’s gracing our homepage and consolidated at that link back there. The value of the conversation is gigantic, and people are working hard to figure out how to leverage that - sometimes for evil, sometimes for good, mostly out of self interest and “because marketing says we have to.” I’ll focus on conversation-centric ways to engage the world of Twitter very soon, but for now bear in mind that audiences appear to prefer two-way channels of communication. To play in that space, you need more than an “ad.”

PS - Hooray! It’s back up!