Twitter vs. the News Cycle, #GMAIL #FAIL

I heavily rely on Gmail for all my email communications (I know, I know...) and usually it's extremly reliable and fast. But today it was sluggish and slow the whole morning. Up until a few minutes ago, when Gmail died completely.

Because our ISP in the office also has it's issues, I wasn't sure, if it really was a Google problem. So I went over to Twitscoop to see, what is buzzing on Twitter right now and within a second I knew, I wasn't alone...



Parts of the big Twitter collective realise that something is wrong with a central part of their infrastructure, they start to tweet scream about it online and with a very short timeframe it appears on everyones radar screen...

Hey, news cycle - keep up with that! ;-)

Btw, Gmail's IMAP and POP servers seems to be up & running, at least occasionally.

How Twitter is changing lifes

If you are still looking for a good explanation why millions of people spent lots of time on Twitter every day, take a look at this slideshare presentation from @minxuan (via Sascha):

View more presentations from Minxuan Lee.

Min Xuan, who is a student in California, gives a pretty complete overview of Twitter and her own experience with it - including her personal "Twitter Hype Cycle" and the "5 Stages of Twitter Acceptance". It is a good how-to-use guide for beginners, too.

She also has a new question to answer with your tweets. Originally Twitter asked "What are you doing?". But that probably got to narrow. So she suggests to change this in your mind to "What has your attention"! Interesting thought...

Twitter explained in Plain English

You keep hearing about Twitter, but you have no idea what all the fuzz is about? Then let the Commoncraft Show explain it to you in plain English...



Other buzz words explained "in plain English" by the Commoncraft Show:

1. Webfeeds - RSS, ATOM & co.
   
2. Wikis
   
3. Social Networking