

Using Twitter to Send Alerts When Your Site Goes Down - anson
http://etherpad.com/ep/blog/posts/using-twitter-to-send-alerts-when-your-site-goes-down

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arasakik
We do this with Chatterous.com, and it works perfectly. We set up a group,
added our monitoring email as a member and have it email the group when
something goes wrong. We get alerts on our phone, IM, or email. The best part
is that one of us also can respond (via phone or IM) to let the others know
someone is taking action on the alert.

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old-gregg
I send emails.

a) Way more reliable.

b) Also land on my phone [with vibration/sound alert]

c) I can put a lot more details in them since there is no 140 chars limit

d) Much easier to do: one line of code - old and simple tech from the 80s
(sendmail) beats ugly kids of tomorrow (Twitter) any day of the week!

Mr. Schmidt was right. :-P

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aaroniba
We send emails too, but it's also nice to get a TXT on your phone for really
urgent information such as a problem with the server.

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jawngee
Why not just email to yournumber@yourcarrier.net and get it as an sms too?

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jmtulloss
The author addressed this in the article.

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jawngee
But then he chooses the second most unreliable route?

I think this approach is neat and novel, but ultimately I don't believe
they've solved their problems.

YAPS/SMSClient with a good gateway SMS provider, if the SMS is that critical.
I don't understand why email only is a failure, assuming they have push email
to their phone (and if you don't, well why not?)

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gengstrand
We do this for both <http://www.dynamicalsoftware.com/cogenuity>
(<http://twitter.com/cogenuity>) and <http://www.code-roller.com>
(<http://twitter.com/code_roller>)

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aschobel
What do you do when Twitter is down?

Why not use pingdom for monitoring like Twitter does.

[http://www.pingdom.com/reports/wx4vra365911/check_overview/?...](http://www.pingdom.com/reports/wx4vra365911/check_overview/?name=Twitter.com)

We use pingdom at 3b and love it.

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makanikai
gah, what is with the 800's ms average response time?

is it safe to say that's pingdom's connection?

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aschobel
They have monitoring locations around the world, but I've been getting
unusually high pings from their Berkeley location.

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mjtokelly
Leaving the Twitter feed public could actually be a nice way to make site
status and maintenance transparent with your users.

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transburgh
With the amount of time Twitter is down would make this an interesting test.

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jmtulloss
How much are they down these days? I thought they had gotten past the massive
reliability issues they used to have.

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jsdalton
They've been on and off for me all day today.

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sabat
That's not Twitter. That's you. I haven't seen Twitter down in months.

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jsdalton
I don't have time to do a screen grab of the fail whale for you. Trust me, I'm
not making this up.

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siculars
imho, twitter (and others like it) will morph into a public messaging
protocol. as more and more people use it the signal will get drowned by the
noise. eventually the only worthwhile way of using twitter will be via
enhanced filtering rules for meaningful information from people you know and
follow.

twitter is really like a public pastebin with great api support which will
allow you to command and control computers remotely. soon the posted messages
will be encrypted nuggets taking the Public out of public.

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sjs382
If the signal gets drowned out by the noise, that's your fault as a user. You
either follow too many people or follow the wrong people. Twitter essentially
acts as a whitelist-based messaging platform.

Note the word "whitelist"

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siculars
as programmers, we always know it is "the users fault." but as users, we
expect a service to have value and "just work." i do specifically mention
getting meaningful information from following users you know.

but how do you find those users? enhanced filtering keyed on multiple vectors
will become the only useful mechanism for consuming information from not only
those you dont follow but also from those you do.

as it stands i tweet on both professional and personal topics. and so do those
that i follow. now if i know these people personally than i may be interested
in their personal tweets. but if i do not, than i dont want non-relevant
tweets cloggin up my feed.

enhanced clients with better, granular consumption controls are the only way
forward.

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sjs382
You don't think that users are capable of deciding who is worth following and
who isn't, but you expect them to employ "enhanced filters"?

There will always be people who get a kick out of following/friending
celebrities, and those who will use twitter for more personal communication or
other uses. It doesn't make either behavior right or wrong or more rewarding
or less rewarding. But the people who claim that twitter sucks because the
interaction isn't personal (or something along those lines) are doing it
wrong. They want something specific out of a service but have (possibly
unknowingly) set it up to do the complete opposite.

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baddox
My site, with my 8 dollar a month shared hosting plan, is down FAR less than
Twitter.

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kubrick
Twitter hasn't had any serious downtime for months.

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old-gregg
Actually it is very simple: adding Twitter to the mix adds one more "moving
part". Shooting a simple email and then multiplexing it (via aliasing, for
instance) to X recipients is easier and more reliable. Create an address like
my-startup-site-is-down@gmail.com and forward to X other destinations from
there (including Twitter if you want), and send your notifications to that
address using standard 20+ year old protocols and tools, instead of some 3rd
party proprietary stuff which was _"released often, released early"_ and
hasn't crashed "in months"

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kubrick
It's slightly more nuanced than you're making it sound. For one thing, Twitter
may very well be more reliable than your email system (YMMV). For another,
email doesn't generally beep loudly and alert you.

The idea that an additional part automatically weakens a system is reductive.
It doesn't necessarily weaken it at all.

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kubrick
You could probably pair this advice with <http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/>
in your is-it-down script, so that you really get a good idea about how
widespread your outage is. Just a thought.

